Gordon Hunter

well alright then
Despite the self-indulgent, whiny-emo stigma that surrounds such a venture, I, Gordon Hunter, have chosen to procure a livejournal for the purpose of cataloging my less trivial ramblings on the human condition in this year of Our Lord 2004.
You can visit my band's website at http://www.internetdj.com/artists.php?op=show&id=19854&genre=21 it is a psycholiterate new wave rock band, certainly a curiosity in this day and age.
but i digress. Onto today's topic:

I awoke from a particularly deep, chakra-balancing sleep this morning with a difficult question of aesthetics: How, in our frenetic, sound-byte driven society can one create art? And, as a follow-up, how can one create art that receives some sort of compensation; monetary, critical, or otherwise?
It was a difficult question, but one that defines my itenerary at this junction in life. Being the product of an austere, stuffy English private education (for which I am both grateful and appalled at), I can't help but view my accomplishments and ambitions under an aesthetic light, and my recent 180-degree shunning of the classical tradition for that of rock music and subsequent shunning of Mother England for its decadent, hormone-crazed daughter America has not done anything to change that. In fact, the question is more pressing now, since classical music is, by definition, artistic and beautiful, despite the outward ugliness of many contemporary works. Rock music's closest relationship to classical came with the dreaded prog-rock phenomenon, so using a model of 'classical injection into rock' is certainly not the answer. But what, then?
The simple (but altogether wrong) answer is that art has no place in a society which has eschewed the three-dimensional vitue of Wisdom for the immediate gratification of two-dimensional Information, in the same manner in which that society eschews a leisurely meal for McDonalds. One might argue that Andy Warhol and his pop-art contemporaries foresaw this and developed their craft to salvage what was left of art in the 20th century, rather than to create commercially-viable art. But surely this answer has some merit? How can it be otherwise when, after four hundred years, Cervantes is still without rival in the novel? Or Shakespeare in theatre? Once the Information Age was heralded in by a sterile fanfare of 0's and 1's, the only developments our civilization has made have been on a horizontal axis, if we are to view Enlightenment as measured on the vertical axis. Life is increasingly more complex, less human, and altogether devoid of art.
With ample deliberation, this was not an acceptable answer to me. Surely there is room for art in our modern, futile world; it is a matter of adaptation. The old paradigms no longer hold up, and why should they? Artists should be forced to evolve to keep up with today's society just the same as everyone else. We may be disadvantaged in that we are forced to compress all artistic intentions into a much smaller portion of perceptual time and space to accommodate modern day attention spans, but this is offset by the much larger palette of tools we are given to work with in the age of media. The foundations of art, the concepts behind the physical representations----these all remain intact...it is the medium that has changed. I am both embarrassed and angered that, after receiving a liberal education from several esteemed schools, it took an early morning epiphany following a night of hard drinking to lead me to this conclusion. Perhaps the world of pretentious academia should step outside their ivory tower for just a moment....they might learn a thing or two.

END

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