7 ms·

Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art,

Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time. It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet. Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)

hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.
- mingus88 1y ago
  It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course. They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
  - dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
    Most of them don't value hard science either.
    - kristopolous 1y ago
      barbrook wrote an essay about this 30 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology Still on the nose.
      - hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
        Incredibly prescient. This quote from 2011 really sums it up: > The original promise of the Californian Ideology, was that the computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    Ok but why would you need a "humanities course" to appreciate art?
    - mingus88 1y ago
      You don’t. It’s a great way to get an introduction to a field outside of your typical realm of expertise though. It’s one of those things that really lets you know how much you don’t know. Then when you comment about such things on the internet you might be open to learning more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are doing.
      - nottorp 1y ago
        I don't know, I don't want to become an expert. I just enjoy my books and paintings and sculptures and architecture... The problems appear when you start assigning a monetary value to everything you do.
  - dmoy 1y ago
    I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally wack. I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music. Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music. I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line. Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
  - trbleclef 1y ago
    Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
    - ddingus 1y ago
      Indeed! I am a strong tech person. Always have been. That said, early in my life I took a chance on music and really enjoyed the performing arts. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I ended up doing Music education for my peers. A beloved teacher had a health issue that left them unable to teach and the substitute did not have the same manner and appreciation for the music and after a few conflicts, they called me out and I (foolishly) accepted! Now I just had to back it up with actions. Short story, "my" class was a success. Students reached their goals, we placed well in competition and that teacher and I developed a great friendship. You are dead on with your comment. And having had the chance to take music education, then turn right around and deliver it seriously was at once crazy and ultra enlightening! I had the realization my chest thumping got me placed into a position where I had an obligation to educate my peers and rid them of that blind spot you wrote of the same as was done for me. And that was the H in "hard." Running the class, prepping pieces for performance, debugging the choir all were what I thought was hard. Nope. Getting them to internalize the humanity of it, language of emotion and all that, is hard. Respect for the art, whatever it may be, is hard. Cultivating the culture of learning, shared vulnerability (in the case of group performing arts) and the intensely personal nature of it all is hard. I grew half a decade doing that as a high schooler, who had no clue at all what they said yes to... In the end, a walk through the humanities is both empowering and enlightening on a level many technical people fail to appreciate. No fault of theirs. They just did not get what I and many others did or gave as the case may be. I can put a notch sharper point on all this for passersby (assuming you and I talking is preaching to the choir): The ones who do not take the trip through the humanities are often told what to do by the ones who did. Thanks for doing the hard work you do. It is often underappreciated.
    - Vegenoid 1y ago
- plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
  We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech and you can see this in how technology develops.
  - egypturnash 1y ago
    Google Translate renders this in English as "Specialist idiots" and I like that.
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    But that word equally describes artists
    - whstl 1y ago
      Celebrities !== Artists
    - eszed 1y ago
      It can. Qualitatively - having spent the first half of my working life in the arts, and now the second nearly-half in tech - all I can say is that serious artists are every bit as smart and driven and interesting as are the serious people in tech. They just don't make as much money, so they don't get much respect.
- BoingBoomTschak 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - HelloMcFly 1y ago
    I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation. I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation. Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
    - BoingBoomTschak 1y ago
      You should mind that old saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out. While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way. There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.
      - HelloMcFly 1y ago
        I think it’s possible to critique art, institutions, or trends without assuming everyone who finds meaning in something is deluded or complicit in cultural decline. Dismissing curiosity or optimism as decadence seems like its own kind of absolutism. Reasonable people can still find value in things even when you don’t, which is kind of my main point. Your comment makes me a little sad, but not for me.
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece is completely externalized to the identity of its author and the history of its composition and cannot be derived from observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.
  - whstl 1y ago
    > Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that. Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".
- airstrike 1y ago
  Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once. I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit. I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
- lolinder 1y ago
  This is an incredibly reductive dismissal of a very diverse group of people who don't find Cage's art in particular to be meaningful.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
13_9_7_7_5_18 1y ago
[dead]
wtcactus 1y ago
[flagged]
- mingus88 1y ago
  If you have ever dabbled in philosophy at all, your notion of “real art” would be the first thing you would have to challenge. “What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.
  - wtcactus 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - piva00 1y ago
      By God, you are truly a trifecta of clichés converging. Where exactly have you got this narrative from? Or even better: please explain how Marxism relates to contemporary art, I can accept just a general line of ideals connecting to each other. I tried to have some leveled way to see your opinions on my other comments but this went a bridge too far, you seem to be repeating a collage of unrelated stuff, as I said in another comment: it's so bad that it isn't even wrong.
      - wtcactus 1y ago
        That is general knowledge, but if you really want to go down that way of "where did you get this narrative from" to try and avoid the subject. Well, you can see it, for instance, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for starters. [1] [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/
        sdf4j 1y ago
        What about Marxism?
TheCondor 1y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you, but you should invert the question and think about it. In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to commit to the project you won't see through, it has a significance to those people making the commitment. What becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also hard to ask "why are we doing this?" In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in. Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in providing a property that they will own, but I could just as well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively changes the living and working future of the parents.
- jl6 1y ago
  Maybe a crisis will occur and maybe our descendants will have to make a tough choice, but that could enrich the story of the performance. If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business. The hopes and desires of one generation can only hold sway over the next for so long.
  - jacobgkau 1y ago
    > If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business. Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the tickets for. Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems like a potential scam in that sense.
7bit 1y ago
Does the ticket come with a snorkeling set?
seydor 1y ago
Cage died in 1992 , this is not contemporary art
- thih9 1y ago
  > Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art
korkybuchek 1y ago
Assume you already know about this given your interests, but just in case: https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/
tshaddox 1y ago
It's a neat goal to keep an organ playing for hundreds of years. I just don't think that's related to the musical composition itself, which is not impressive to me. The fact that Cage added the phrase "as slow as possible" is not, in my opinion, musically interesting. It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.
- brookst 1y ago
  Cage created art that transcends music and you are rightfully noting that it is not that impressive when judged solely on musical merit. It’s like saying a dodecahedron isn’t that impressive when viewed sitting on a 2D plane because it’s just a triangke and there are more interesting 2D shapes. True, but so reductive it’s tautological.
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    In what way does it transcend music? What other form of art, other than music, is he operating in?
mcv 1y ago
And while it may be contemporary avant garde now, by the time the performance is finished, it will be a timeless classic.
globular-toast 1y ago
Yeah, something has been lost in current generations. I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation books where the protagonist dies at the beginning but leaves behind the foundations of a thousand-year plan to rebuild civilisation after the collapse that he predicts including a time capsule that opens following predicted crises. I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all. This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  Some Anathem vibes too! Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".

hbsbsbsndk 1y ago

It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.

mingus88 1y ago
It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course. They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
- dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
  Most of them don't value hard science either.
  - kristopolous 1y ago
    barbrook wrote an essay about this 30 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology Still on the nose.
    - hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
      Incredibly prescient. This quote from 2011 really sums it up: > The original promise of the Californian Ideology, was that the computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.
- nottorp 1y ago
  Ok but why would you need a "humanities course" to appreciate art?
  - mingus88 1y ago
    You don’t. It’s a great way to get an introduction to a field outside of your typical realm of expertise though. It’s one of those things that really lets you know how much you don’t know. Then when you comment about such things on the internet you might be open to learning more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are doing.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      I don't know, I don't want to become an expert. I just enjoy my books and paintings and sculptures and architecture... The problems appear when you start assigning a monetary value to everything you do.
- dmoy 1y ago
  I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally wack. I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music. Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music. I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line. Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
- trbleclef 1y ago
  Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
  - ddingus 1y ago
    Indeed! I am a strong tech person. Always have been. That said, early in my life I took a chance on music and really enjoyed the performing arts. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I ended up doing Music education for my peers. A beloved teacher had a health issue that left them unable to teach and the substitute did not have the same manner and appreciation for the music and after a few conflicts, they called me out and I (foolishly) accepted! Now I just had to back it up with actions. Short story, "my" class was a success. Students reached their goals, we placed well in competition and that teacher and I developed a great friendship. You are dead on with your comment. And having had the chance to take music education, then turn right around and deliver it seriously was at once crazy and ultra enlightening! I had the realization my chest thumping got me placed into a position where I had an obligation to educate my peers and rid them of that blind spot you wrote of the same as was done for me. And that was the H in "hard." Running the class, prepping pieces for performance, debugging the choir all were what I thought was hard. Nope. Getting them to internalize the humanity of it, language of emotion and all that, is hard. Respect for the art, whatever it may be, is hard. Cultivating the culture of learning, shared vulnerability (in the case of group performing arts) and the intensely personal nature of it all is hard. I grew half a decade doing that as a high schooler, who had no clue at all what they said yes to... In the end, a walk through the humanities is both empowering and enlightening on a level many technical people fail to appreciate. No fault of theirs. They just did not get what I and many others did or gave as the case may be. I can put a notch sharper point on all this for passersby (assuming you and I talking is preaching to the choir): The ones who do not take the trip through the humanities are often told what to do by the ones who did. Thanks for doing the hard work you do. It is often underappreciated.
  - Vegenoid 1y ago
plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech and you can see this in how technology develops.
- egypturnash 1y ago
  Google Translate renders this in English as "Specialist idiots" and I like that.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  But that word equally describes artists
  - whstl 1y ago
    Celebrities !== Artists
  - eszed 1y ago
    It can. Qualitatively - having spent the first half of my working life in the arts, and now the second nearly-half in tech - all I can say is that serious artists are every bit as smart and driven and interesting as are the serious people in tech. They just don't make as much money, so they don't get much respect.
BoingBoomTschak 1y ago
[flagged]
- HelloMcFly 1y ago
  I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation. I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation. Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
  - BoingBoomTschak 1y ago
    You should mind that old saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out. While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way. There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.
    - HelloMcFly 1y ago
      I think it’s possible to critique art, institutions, or trends without assuming everyone who finds meaning in something is deluded or complicit in cultural decline. Dismissing curiosity or optimism as decadence seems like its own kind of absolutism. Reasonable people can still find value in things even when you don’t, which is kind of my main point. Your comment makes me a little sad, but not for me.
AlexandrB 1y ago
I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece is completely externalized to the identity of its author and the history of its composition and cannot be derived from observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.
- whstl 1y ago
  > Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that. Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".
airstrike 1y ago
Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once. I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit. I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
lolinder 1y ago
This is an incredibly reductive dismissal of a very diverse group of people who don't find Cage's art in particular to be meaningful.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

13_9_7_7_5_18 1y ago

[dead]

wtcactus 1y ago

[flagged]

mingus88 1y ago
If you have ever dabbled in philosophy at all, your notion of “real art” would be the first thing you would have to challenge. “What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.
- wtcactus 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - piva00 1y ago
    By God, you are truly a trifecta of clichés converging. Where exactly have you got this narrative from? Or even better: please explain how Marxism relates to contemporary art, I can accept just a general line of ideals connecting to each other. I tried to have some leveled way to see your opinions on my other comments but this went a bridge too far, you seem to be repeating a collage of unrelated stuff, as I said in another comment: it's so bad that it isn't even wrong.
    - wtcactus 1y ago
      That is general knowledge, but if you really want to go down that way of "where did you get this narrative from" to try and avoid the subject. Well, you can see it, for instance, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for starters. [1] [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/
      - sdf4j 1y ago
        What about Marxism?

TheCondor 1y ago

I'm not disagreeing with you, but you should invert the question and think about it. In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to commit to the project you won't see through, it has a significance to those people making the commitment. What becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also hard to ask "why are we doing this?" In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in. Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in providing a property that they will own, but I could just as well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively changes the living and working future of the parents.

jl6 1y ago
Maybe a crisis will occur and maybe our descendants will have to make a tough choice, but that could enrich the story of the performance. If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business. The hopes and desires of one generation can only hold sway over the next for so long.
- jacobgkau 1y ago
  > If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business. Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the tickets for. Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems like a potential scam in that sense.

7bit 1y ago

Does the ticket come with a snorkeling set?

seydor 1y ago

Cage died in 1992 , this is not contemporary art

thih9 1y ago
> Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art

korkybuchek 1y ago

Assume you already know about this given your interests, but just in case: https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/

tshaddox 1y ago

It's a neat goal to keep an organ playing for hundreds of years. I just don't think that's related to the musical composition itself, which is not impressive to me. The fact that Cage added the phrase "as slow as possible" is not, in my opinion, musically interesting. It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.

brookst 1y ago
Cage created art that transcends music and you are rightfully noting that it is not that impressive when judged solely on musical merit. It’s like saying a dodecahedron isn’t that impressive when viewed sitting on a 2D plane because it’s just a triangke and there are more interesting 2D shapes. True, but so reductive it’s tautological.
- tshaddox 1y ago
  In what way does it transcend music? What other form of art, other than music, is he operating in?

mcv 1y ago

And while it may be contemporary avant garde now, by the time the performance is finished, it will be a timeless classic.

globular-toast 1y ago

Yeah, something has been lost in current generations. I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation books where the protagonist dies at the beginning but leaves behind the foundations of a thousand-year plan to rebuild civilisation after the collapse that he predicts including a time capsule that opens following predicted crises. I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all. This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.

grues-dinner 1y ago
Some Anathem vibes too! Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".