From Kent Williams Sent Wed, May 20th 1998, 17:04
From Kent Williams Sent Wed, May 20th 1998, 17:04
On Wed, 20 May 1998, Zenon M. Feszczak wrote: > If I found out that the Rachmaninov concerto to which I was listening was > in fact sequenced, it would change my perception for the worse. Why? I would think that the evidence of one's own ears should be the deciding factor. Though that might be a bad example. A nice grand piano under the hands of a really good musician has continuous, fractally complex shadings of expression, beyond (in my opinion) ANY recording medium. My father is a symphony conductor, and I've heard people like Loren Hollander, Leonard Pennario, and George Shearing from 10 feet away on my mom's kickass Steinway. You had to be there. Not dance music, but amazing stuff regardless. > Then again, if I found out that a supposedly algorithmic piece of music was > in fact improvised live or composed fully on paper, that would also change > my perception. > Even stuff written by hand on paper is algorithmic. Computers are just there to make it easier to automatically generate lame shit. > For the same reason, an original and a forgery of an artwork are valued > differently even if the final aesthetic products are indistinguishable. > Read "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis and get back to me. While this is perhaps a true statement where the value is monetary, for me it's very much debatable where the value is artistic. Most art forgery is caught out because it's fundamentally not as good as the original in the eyes of discerning viewers. I've no doubt that there are forgers over the years that have been so good that we don't in fact know whether all our favorite paintings are real or forged. It all goes back to Mahayana Buddhism. Everything you can perceive is illusion.