Landscape Memory and Desire and the Art of Music

In short, art these postmodern days seems to have become another depressing way of passing time rather than of reaching beyond time, which is what it was for van Gogh. Art is no longer the path to salvation it was for him, but rather confirms that life is damned because it is meaningless, which is ultimately why art is meaningless, since it can do nothing to rescue life from itself.

…but there are still artists who believe in the imaginative refinement , under the auspices of the unconscious, of raw social and physical material into aesthetically transcendent art. They are the hold outs against postart, utilizing avant-garde modes of art making that seem historical and passé from a postmodern point of view.”

The End of Art – Donald Kuspit – Cambridge University press 2004

I feel that that Art is often poorer if it ignores this context of the 'end of art' and is more interesting when it confronts this situation. This confrontation may be oblique and I am not suggesting this as a aim or purpose more as friction to strike against. This 'oblique strategy' can come from an optimistic post post modern approach of celebration rather than nilism and defeat. If Art won't work lets just play. “And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life -not an attempt to bring order out of chaos ... but simply a way of waking up to the life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”

JOHN CAGE ('Experimental Music', Silence, 12)