John Cage wanted to dissolve the boundaries between art and the ordinary world by blurring the differences between music and noise; an ideal that, as it is well known, was embraced also by his Fluxus pupils in other artforms. Yet, it is not clear to me what exactly Cage’s ultimate aim was: whether to reduce art to ordinary objects or to elevate everyday sounds to the status of music.

On the one hand, he maintained, music should not convey any meaning. Music must be pure sound. Moreover, music shouldn’t be melodic, for it is the resposability of the artist—he said—to hide beauty. In this sense, we might interpret, he wanted to reduce music to ordinary sounds/noises.

On the other hand, the way in which he called attention to the sounds of everyday life was by awarding them a place in rituals traditionally restricted to Music. Sound, then, we could think, should be as 'noble' as music, and it deserves to be heard as music currently is; we should be  able to appreciate the richness and the (aesthetic?) interest of noise/sound.

It seems to me that his real aim was the former, at least if we take his writings literally. Yet, what he really did was the latter. After all, placing an ordinary sound in an extra-ordinary context as the music theatre—as placing an ordinary object like a urinary in a museum—conveys certain meaning to the sound piece and certainly changes its character.

In any case, this doesn’t really matter much. You may think, as the audience that laughs in the video, that this is just a nonsensical whim of an eccentric artist. But, like it or not, Cage opened a place for sound and noise in music. Before, music, at the most, just imitated sounds, but after Cage—and the advent of electronic music—we hear everyday noises in all types of music from soundtracks to Manu Chao.

It is always good to know one is not alone in this world. Actually, I have sometimes played Royksopp while fighting against deadlines

[The author of this video is Bang-yao Liu, a student of the Savannah College of Art and Design.This was his senior project]

Last week at the LAF, the speaker mentioned an anecdote of a girl who was surprised (and surely shocked) at discovering that the coincidence in name between her chicken sandwich and that of the Gallus domestics (AKA ordinary chicken) wasn't arbitrary. This is not an isolated case; apparently, many urban kids have trouble—or simply fail—to associate the content of supermarket food trays with the actual animals they are a product of*.

This lack of agriculture is certainly part of the price some urbanites have to pay for living far from nature. But of course, there are ways to (try to) compensate for the problem. You can buy nice illustrated books, subscribe to National Geographic or do some travelling. Alternatively, you can go ironic or even cynical and laugh at your own weaknesses; and if you are talented enough, you can even turn this into art.

This is the case of the street artist Banksy, who held a very cool exhibition opened a very cool and peculiar Pet Shop last autumn in Greenwich Village, N.Y.C.  The shop is the product of Bansky's  sarcastic view on the relation that certain children of the asphalt have to animals: "New Yorkers don’t care about art, they care about pets. So I’m exhibiting them instead. I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing. "... Chicken nuggets and swimming fish fingers,  moving sausages,  and other mechanically animated beasts that you wouldn't want to miss.

The Pet Shop is now closed and, since I happen to live an ocean far from Manhattan, I didn’t have the chance to visit it. Fortunately, we will always have Youtube and the internet. And, although it is not the same, we can still enjoy part of the experience.

I tell you, mine might be a twisted mind, or perhaps living in big cities has severely affected me; but I guess I would be more prone to go to a pet shop like this than to the zoo—which probably proves that I just didn’t get the point. Oh well.

Dan contends that photography is fictionally incompetent: photographs are only of those particulars they are causally related to, and obviously, fictional entities cannot interact causally with existent materials such as photographic film; they simply do not reflect light.

But what about this shark bird? Isn't it a fictional representation made by photographic means?

[I can't remember where I got this image from, if any of the readers of this blog happens to know, please tell me so I can credit the author] 

Happy May Day

by Artwerk

Creepy  old ads.

Also interesting but completely off topic : 9 clever bussiness cards

The full text of the article is transcribed here. Don't miss the entertaining illustrations.