Re: (It's really awful, isn't it?) Therefore p.

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The most acceptable outcome of the game is not yet lost to us: the Pats win by that fumbledown in the end zone, and Brady and Manning spend the rest of the night in an INT shootout.


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 5:31 PM
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Wrong thread, you.


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 5:32 PM
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Now games can't be categorized with art?


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 5:39 PM
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The game's getting far from art in any case.

trends towards ever greater precision in music notation for all manner of dynamic, tempo, and other niceties

I could Google the original but by this do what's the time horizon on this trend? It's been a long time since I played any aleatoric music, but what I recall music that incorporated visual elements, site specificity, and of course chance—for example, my oboe teacher, a bassoonist, played a duet for bassoon that required both players to wear stethoscopes to measure the pulses of the goldfish swimming in a bowl, which the players "transcribed" as music—so I wonder whether 1) something has changed very recently in composition and I'm just not up on it or 2) Gann's considering some long arc of Western music, in which case, wouldn't the prominence of improvisation in jazz be a counter trend.

Naivete about the way that the art world worked had me believing for a long time that any art form that was irrevocably a product with commercial obligations could not be high art. Not a violation on aesthetic grounds but disqualification for reasons of distribution. I changed my opinion, reluctantly, when 1) I saw The Wire and 2) I learned more about how art is made and sold. In any case, tThose Geico Caveman commercials? Case closed.


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 5:56 PM
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I am trying to square Werner Herzog's Klaus Kinski movies with "rigorous lawlike predictability" and enjoying the effort. It's like dynamic tension for the brain!


Posted by: snarkout | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 6:00 PM
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Having just Friday night discovered the long-repressed masterpiece of Jose Mojica Marins, aka Coffin Joe, Awakening of the Beast I agree with all of Teachout's points. Filmed in an abandoned synagogue in Sao Paulo, financed by passing the hat, cast with street hippies, relatives, and anyone who would bring food, drink, or drugs Mojica's total control and dedication to his singular transcendant vision (he is just recently finishing a movie begun in 1967) certainly elevates Mojica from mere craftsman like Spielberg and Coppola into the immortal heights of Godard and Ozu.

And with a goatee 40 years before its time besides! I swear he looks so familar in his younger days.

I would provide other links, but the Mystery of Mojica can only be experienced in Portugese. Sorry.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 6:15 PM
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Gann's considering graduate education in composition, the bodies that award grants, commissions, and other prizes, and that kind of stuff; apparently in the mainstream of the contemporary classical world, not having extremely thorough tempo and dynamic markings in your score is a fast track to de facto disqualification. Jazz isn't playing that game (and neither, really, is aleatoric music or what I suppose was once called the downtown scene, though that might not be a matter of choice on its part), so doesn't constitute a counterexample. Here is an essay on the subject.

What were your reasons of distribution?


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 6:20 PM
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And here is something much shorter.


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 6:25 PM
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There's such a massive bottleneck and so much compromise that must be trucked in order to distribute a film. The structural barriers to creating a film are vastly higher than barriers to exhibiting in a commercial gallery or otherwise participating in the art world—and guerrilla cinema is elusive, if not unthinkable.

All of those things have changed to some degree, though.


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 6:39 PM
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Aren't those aesthetic reasons by proxy?


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 6:42 PM
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I am out of touch with the contemporary classical world but it seemed moribund 40 years ago. There's a lot of contempt for the very idea that music should have an audience. It exists almost entirely because of university subsidies, I think


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 6:54 PM
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I read 6 as: And with a goatse 40 years before its time besides! Frightening.


Posted by: Becks | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 7:12 PM
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Aren't those aesthetic reasons by proxy?

Well, studio films were (and are) rarely, if ever, created without a preexisting contract for distribution or with independent financing, so it could be the case that the market is closed to films that do not dovetail with the interests of commercial financiers. Sure, on the flip side of that coin are aesthetic concerns. I'd say film is unique because until recently film was for a genre that could be disseminated or otherwise enjoyed except via the studio contract.


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 7:13 PM
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This Teachout sounds like a right pillock to me. But it's amusing to see that fascist film criticism has finally decided to acknowledge that movies were still being produced after the year of our Lord one-thousand nine-hundred and sixty though.

Speaking of i fascisti, I just got back from seeing El Laberinto del Fauno (Guillermo del Toro, 2006). It met my first criterion for works of art, which is that it reaffirmed my existing prejudices. Specifically, it underscored the points that the only good fascist is a dead one, and that anyone who thinks that the restoration of the Bourbons is a mark of Spain's advancement is living in a dream world. The many references to Luis Buñuel were nice to see as well, particularly since its inevitable that this film will be compared to Buñuel's oeuvre, as virtually every Spanish film is, and at least the comparison will have some basis in fact this time. (Some dork even compared Carne trémula (Pedro Almodóvar, 1997) to Buñuel's films, when it hasn't the slightest thing to do with any of them.)


Posted by: minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 7:14 PM
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11 is almost certainly true for a great deal of contemporary poetry.

I'm not sure how true it is for contemporary classical music. A lot of these academic composers are also actively making their music available online, at the very minimum, and many of them seek out cross-over opportunities, like scoring for movies, dance, and art installations. I know one guy who financed a very nice Manhattan lifestyle--as a grad student, supposedly--by scoring pornos.


Posted by: Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 7:14 PM
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"could" s/b "couldn't" in the last sentence of 13, I assume?


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 7:33 PM
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Aarrgh, right.


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 7:37 PM
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I'm beyond tired and emotional at this point and more at the stage of watching against a heart attack, so to turn from the game: I've nothing to say about TT's article in Commentary, but I've recently picked up a book that Joy Garnett raved about last year, Sweet Dreams: Complicity and Contemporary Art. And I have to say, it's really, really good. I'm only a couple of chapters in, but I'd say it's a must read for anyone inclined to kvetch about criticism, art, art theory, contemporary aesthetics, and related topics.


Posted by: JL | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 7:45 PM
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11 is almost certainly true for a great deal of contemporary poetry.

Really? Huh. My only acquaintance with contemporary poetry (for "contemporary" read "7 to 15 years ago") was through poetry slams and open-mic readings and in that environment audience seemed like a really key component of the poetry.

Hey in the context of film appreciation I've got to plead with all of you guys to watch Cléo de 5 à 7 and Sans Toit ni Loi, they are two such amazing, mind-boggling movies, they have subtly affected the lenses through which I view the world. Here are a couple of posts I wrote about them.


Posted by: Clownaesthesiologist | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 7:54 PM
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15: Already by ~1965 music departments were split between the students who wanted to score movies and ads and the ones who wanted to do art music. The former were tolerated.

I recently read that even Krzysztof Penderecki has been criticized because his music is too accessible and makes too many concessions to the audience.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 8:04 PM
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Poetry slams are the rock and roll of poetry. Someone like Ashbery is kind of opaque, but he is limpid as a little brook compared to the language poets (are they still around?) who would oddly refer to someone like Ashbery as "academic".


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 8:13 PM
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Do people still go around saying that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made in Hollywood? Christ.


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 8:18 PM
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actual high/serious art is always the product of an "iron-willed genius" exerting "single-minded control", never the outcome of a collaboration

So much for the great cathedrals of Europe (to say nothing of the monuments of much of Asia). When I think of the *time* I've wasted contemplating them . . .!


Posted by: dr ngo | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 8:48 PM
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23: Actually I think the great cathedrals of Europe would qualify as the products of iron-willed geniuses. Cf. Brunelleschi's dome.


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 8:51 PM
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Chartres?


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 8:53 PM
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Franz Josef Haydn was a brute, but he got the job done. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 8:58 PM
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As far as classical music, the disdain for audience and self-justifying radicalism mentioned by John Emerson has considerably subsided in the last 40 years. A few other moderately interesting developments have also come to pass--not to argue contemporary classical music is an awesomely healthy enterprise. Anyway, I even like some of that irritating 60's stuff.

The TT essay is so outstandingly inane it could only appear in a right-wing publication. (He writes for the WSJ, too.)


Posted by: gundryggia | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 9:08 PM
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Brunelleschi may have been iron-willed, but he came along centuries too late to build "the great cathedrals of Europe," which are medieval (or even mediaeval) in origins.

By the Renaissance (Renascence) the idea of the Artist [capitalized] as divinely-inspired individual was beginning to circulate - at least among artists - but we have almost no evidence for this over the previous millennium or so which therefore (thus TT) must not have produced any real Art. QED.


Posted by: dr ngo | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 10:09 PM
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I think I'm in the top 0.01% of Americans with respect to interest in contemporary classical music, but my only experience with it has been to buy a copy of this about four years ago and never try to listen to it because I don't think any of the settings I ever find myself in would do it justice.


Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 10:13 PM
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It's a fine point to niggle, Dr Ngo, and catching TT on a technicality doesn't refute his argument (IMHO); it's pretty clear he's talking about the notion of art expressed since the Renaissance. But in any case there are more apt examples of collectivist art than the cathedrals you cite: since, after all, there is a great deal of research to attribute previous architectural innovations to architects. For example, Expertise contains a great discussion about the upper flying buttresses at Chartres and why an architect would have thought to install them and why it was very likely an architect's decision; and, of course, rationalists and antirationalist illusionists (two camps of Gothic study) will tell you for entirely different reasons that it takes more than a village, it takes an Architect.

But that's neither here nor there. There are more apt technical counterexamples than the cathedrals: I'm thinking in particular of calligraphy and illumination. Orhan Pamuk offers a meditation on the topic in My Name Is Red


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 10:50 PM
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calligraphy and illumination

Also primarily pre-Renaissance arts, no?


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 10:56 PM
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Since TT doesn't offer an argument, but rather an endorsement of a worn-out myth, it will be hard for anyone to refute his argument.

With manuscript illumination one also has to wonder about the applicability of "art" at all (partially because of the late predominant conception of what the term denotes, admittedly).


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 11:06 PM
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Expertise contains a great discussion about the upper flying buttresses at Chartres and why an architect would have thought to install them and why it was very likely an architect's decision

But Chartres, as a whole, was not an architect's vision. Which is the point, I thought. Or else you're making a very deep point that I don't get.


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 01-21-07 11:20 PM
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Those Gann articles are pretty interesting.

I don't play enough contemporary guitar compositions* to have a real sense of whether the same generalization about increasing notational precision holds true of solo guitar music but I have a feeling it does.

* mostly because they are really hard ...


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 12:22 AM
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30, 33: Is this useful:

Combative though they were in dealing with each other, the Scholastics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were unanimous in accepting the authorities and prided themselves on their skill in understanding and exploiting them rather than on the originality of their own thought. One feels the breath of a new era when William of Ockham, whose nominalism was to cut the ties between reason and faith and who could say: "What Aristotle thought about this, I don't care," goes out of his way to deny the influence of his most important forerunner, Peter Aureolus. An attitude similar to that of High Scholasticism must be presupposed in the builders of the High Gothic cathedrals. For these architects the great structures of the past had an auctoritas quite similar to that which the Fathers had for the schoolmen. Of two apparently contradictory motifs, both of them sanctioned by authority, one could not simply be rejected in favor of the other. They had to be worked through to the limit and they had to be reconciled in the end; much as a saying of St. Augustine had ultimately to be reconciled with one of St. Ambrose. And this, I believe, accounts to some extent for the apparently erractic yet stubbornly consistent evolution of Early and High Gothic architecture; it too, proceeded according to the scheme: videtur quod--sed contra--respondeo dicendum.

- Panofsky, 'Gothic Architecture & Scholasticism' (1951)


Posted by: Will Taft | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 2:38 AM
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Don't anybody tell the compagnons du devoir about the architect's centrality!


Posted by: Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 7:17 AM
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33: You could say that Chartres was commissioned and financed collectively. In other respects, though, it was built like any other building (though unique for having more than one master—the choir is supposed to have been done by a different architect than the nave, IIRC). It wasn't an Amish barn-raising, that's all I'm saying.


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 8:00 AM
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..In a stunning development, Terry Teachout reveals he has not looked seriously at a single piece of art since Jackson Pollock.

In other news, the sky is blue and f=ma.

It's kind of stunning that Teachout can make the most insulting, elitist of arguments while still maintaining an unbelievably facile populism. But I guess that's the advantage of bald-faced reactionary aesthetics.


Posted by: Hal Incandenza Knee Braces | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 8:46 AM
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I'm surprised that the architectural genius of Albert Speer wasn't mentioned. In an egalitarian society he couldn't have accomplished half of what he did.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 8:55 AM
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I just wanted to note that while I can almost always tell which unfogged author wrote a post without looking at the name of the author, I thought this was a Labs post until I clicked through. The title ssmes especially Labsian.


Posted by: washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 10:06 AM
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seems


Posted by: washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 10:07 AM
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(though unique for having more than one master--the choir is supposed to have been done by a different architect than the nave, IIRC).

I don't think Chartres was unique among medieval cathedrals in having more than one master. Weren't some of them built over a period of generations? Even Brunelleschi's dome was built on top of someone else's nave.

It's questionable whether the sculptors and painters and stained glass makers and so on who participated in the creation of the medieval cathedrals thought of themselves as Artists with a capital A. From our perspective though, I think they would be, which makes the cathedral a communal work, coordinated rather than exhaustively envisioned by the master of the work.


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 10:11 AM
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40: You thought that because the post is academic without being willfully obscure. Really Ben, what happened to your inscrutability?

People have been talking about great artist theories as if they are a product of the renaissance, but I always thought they didn't fully flower until the Romantic era. The lifetime of the theory was about 1790-1960, when people realized that a lot of those macho abstract expressionists were assholes.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 11:30 AM
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The title is somewhat obscure…


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 11:34 AM
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I just rewatched Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. I didn't much like it the first time I saw it. I liked it much better the second time. Some of this is because it had a much cleaner print. It was good but it wasn't that good.

I looked the film up on the Internet and I found out that there were weird historical reasons for it to be considered one of the greatest film ever. It was a big flop and filmgoers hated the movie when it first came out. It was then banned by the nazis and prints of the film were unavailable for a long period of time. The film was unavailable even as it was being placed on "sight and sounds" top ten movie list for 1950.

Renoir's Grand Illusion is probably better but it was a big hit.

I do think in general that the good is better than the great. If you only want to read great books, see great films and listen to great music, you probably don't like books, films, and music that much.


Posted by: Joeo | Link to this comment | 01-22-07 1:50 PM
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