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Thus the endless, and now monotonous, tinkering with form and efforts to be ever more novel or revolutionary. Impressionism, Expressionism, cubism, futurism, serial music, surrealism, symbolism, pop art, etc. Here you have composers and artists who are constantly under the gun to radically innovate in the formal sense or simply be deemed irrelevant. And they are necessarily wedded to a linear, forward-driving "progress" that views the future as ever more enlightened than the present or the past. Art transformed into science, so to speak. I find this Weltanschauung to be highly questionable, especially when even sophisticated audiences begin to lose interest and have to be cajoled and reassured that it is only because they are such boobs and so challenged in 
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an evolutionary sense that they don't "get it"~"but in the meantime, do write another check to support our arts group, and thus, art as such." This just seems to be too easy an "out" for an artist who might in fact simply be untalented, inartistic and a bore. That is why I try to counter this tendency by demanding that art be emotionally engaging and attract a non-professional audience. Yes, I agree that art has certain natural elitism that does not fit in well with mass society and democracy. The artist, after all, is supposed to a talented genius, not a typical person. He is supposed to see what the rest of us can't see, and translate it into something that we find  |
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