One of the important facets of post-modernism over the last 50 years is our art’s focus on bringing the audience’s attention to what they are doing, the setting they are in, what they ate for lunch or what they wear. This is an important goal to achieve, as it de-limits what can be done. The problem with this is the works that are most effective as an idea are not necessarily the most communicative to a non-educated audience. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that either, but to create the cultural changes needed to break down a convention, an idea needs to be easily communicable as well as well-founded and thought out.
Take John Cage’s ideas on unorganized sound:
But when I hear the sound of traffic, here on sixth avenue for instance. I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking*. I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things, I’m completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me.
*He stated earlier that listening to organized sound (music) is like hearing a conversation or relationship.
Mr. Cage’s idea that sound is beautiful is all fine and good (and so very true), but that doesn’t make the sounds we interact with in our daily lives, or even speech, art. Cage is reacting to these sounds (traffic) as aesthetic objects, like most people would react to the beauty of the Giant Sequoias. This does not make his traffic noise art work. Not until he creates the sound space for these random sounds in 4:33 do they take on the intentionality required for something the be “art”. The million dollar question is whether this is effective art. Take a listen:
After the first performance of the work, Mr. Cage had this to say about the reaction of the audience:
They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.
We view these trees as beautiful aesthetic objects, not art.
I believe this is the absolute worst thing any artist can say. Laying the blame on the audience for their ignorance is not the answer for the composer’s inability to communicate an idea. It is not that the audience didn’t know how to listen, but rather that Cage didn’t know how to tell so that the audience would listen. Maybe this is the best way that the idea of “listen to your surroundings” can be conveyed, but if that is the best we can do, the late explanation does not help his case (I personally believe Cage was trying hard to press buttons, and the philosophical underpinnings of the work are only half the inspiration). It’s like the famous psychology white shirt experiment with the guy in the gorilla suit walking through unbeknown to the viewer.
This is an issue of misdirected attention on the part of the cultural institution. The audience arrives expecting to hear traditional European art music, but instead gets a guy with a time piece opening and closing the piano lid intermittently. No one is going to “get it” the first time around because they haven’t been told what to look for. In reflection, but only in the context of reflection, does 4:33 become a master stroke. This is not because it highlights what would normally be viewed as aesthetic objects by John Cage in his loft on 6th Ave, but because it highlights our focus on the institution of concert music. Great art music? Maybe… Something I’d like to listen to? No. A work that deserves to be talked about? Well, I just did.