Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/10/03
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Nathan wrote: "I think that we tend to forget that many of the great classical composers were the pop musicians of their day, and most of the great pieces of music we know and love today were simple commission jobs for some prince or king or other rich supporter." True, somewhat. Handel was very popular as a favourite of the English court, Mozart had success both in court circles and with the nascent concert audience. Beethoven was a favorite of cultivated listeners, who's appeal diminished as his compositions got more advanced and he stopped performing. It was the opera composers who were really the hit makers, and not considered front rank innovators. Many popular works were not artless, despite their origins or popular success, just as much pop music of the recent past has tremendous craft behind it. A friend and I were grooving to the Fifth Dimension Saturday night (after several glasses) and marvelling at the top to bottom beauty of the arrangements and infectious spirit of those records. Of course, we both hated that crap when we were teenagers! But celebrating stuff that is easy to like, as artful as it might be, isn't quite the point. It's the value of the challenge that difficult works represent to culture and the possible loss of that challenge that is more at issue. Posterity might have to make a leap of understanding to appreciate The Beatles in two centuries, just as we do to appreciate Beethoven now. But we have to make an effort today to appreciate Stravinsky or John Adams, Robert Frank or William Eggleston, and their immediate descendants. Whatever posterity decides, it's those artists who stretch our minds today who form a cultural landscape that can result in the next Beethoven, or Lennon&McCartney. Just because Ansel Adams, for instance, is easy to like, that doesn't make him a lesser artist. But, given popular recognition of only his most accessible/famous works, will he be important to the future of photography or an impediment? Might that one style, the static popular acceptance of those works as certified masterpieces, with no other artists placed on the pedestal, end up representing the whole of art photography and thus choke off acceptance of other, less heroic/idealized concepts? Worse, might the slick, cheesy, manufactured products of advertising, high craft in service of the basest purposes, become, by default, all the popular imagination can accept of photography? CP - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html