Saturday, April 10, 2004
Occasionally, I find that amongst my friends and I, there is a common tendency to search out things to lend our assent to. We say things like "that's good!" or "yeah, really worth hearing" and such to all manner of things we come across, mostly music, films and art. But, I am finding that this is becoming a dangerous thing, in the same way that being a critic is a dangerous thing to oneself. It seems that all we are doing is looking for things to put a stamp on, "good" or "bad", "worth hearing/seeing/reading" or "not", and (in my case) "edifying" or "debasing." There's so little effort put into actual analysis or reflection, we seek all of these lovely things, but only to put them into our little museums and then to move onto the next attractive object.
This is why I am always so glad to see articles like Music from the Once Festival by Joe Milazzo, which I have hardly begun to read. It is wonderful to see such effort put into reflection onto a work, in a non-academic sense. You can think of a viewer as completing a work of art, in the way that a context can complete an incomplete description. It's *necessary* that we have reflections like this one, in order to really remind us of the depths that some of these works that we admire have, to see someone so rigorously map them out is heartening.
This is why I am always so glad to see articles like Music from the Once Festival by Joe Milazzo, which I have hardly begun to read. It is wonderful to see such effort put into reflection onto a work, in a non-academic sense. You can think of a viewer as completing a work of art, in the way that a context can complete an incomplete description. It's *necessary* that we have reflections like this one, in order to really remind us of the depths that some of these works that we admire have, to see someone so rigorously map them out is heartening.
