9/29/08

Happy Fuzzy Bunny Story Time Art!

Ah, Mr Ward. What would I do without you?

Houston Symphony Challenges Its Listeners

Many of us would prefer that art not disturb us.

What? All art should be Happy Fuzzy Bunny Story Time? Should not Art bring up the deepest issues of human nature? The most profound questions of our (or any other) time? Question our perceptions, and, yes, even beliefs?

Entertain us? Yes.

Wow. I guess, most superficially, entertainment is one goal of art. I think it's called The Entertainment Industry.

Fine Art, to me, whether visual, aural, or otherwise, should have loftier goals. Like, I don't know, being profound?

Reinforce our notions of beauty? Certainly.

Or perhaps challenge our notions of beauty? What is beauty? (Suddenly I'm fucking Socrates over here.)

Is this beautiful?

How about this?

Remind us of the wretched evil that can be found at times in mankind? Please, no.

Please, yes. We need to be reminded from time to time. Remember this dude?

Yeah, let's try not to forget not letting that shit happen again. Or this:

Let's actually try to keep in mind the evil of which man is capable.

In other words, we prefer Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to Dmitri Shostakovich's 13th.

We do? Who are we? Who am I? Who are you? Not Russian, apparently.

[snip]

But then we reverse direction! WTF? At the end of the article:

Art does have the role of reminding us of the dark side of man. Graf and his forces left, for me, a vivid reminder of that reality.

Yes! Exactly? What? You...like...what you don't want?

So...confused. Need...drink...

5 comments:

Empiricus said...

I think you mean, "amusement industry."

Sator Arepo said...

Whatever. Ferris wheels and roller coasters and all that.

At least my pictures were (mostly) fun to look at.

anzu said...

Is this the da da da Dum guy?

I found this sentence funny: "He raged and despaired flawlessly."

They seriously need a copy editor or a better editor over there. I just skimmed the review and already found 4 or 5 little errors, plus I find his writing extremely awkward and clunky.
(And did the concert really span three weekends? I'm unclear what he means by a three weekend concert. I won't nitpick about how three-weekend should be hyphenated, because that's the least of his problems.)

Sator Arepo said...

Yeah, anzu, I almost went further with this piece, but I got really sleepy from Benadryl (allergies!) and had to cut it short. There were many snark-worthy (see what I did there?) moments towards the end of the article.

Sometimes I seriously think they killed all the editors in Houston (or as we say around here, H-Town).

anzu said...

In that case, you should skip the drink at the end of the article. Drinking and Benadryl don't mix. At all.