There is art in everything.
Art is a technical skill that merges the contradiction between creativity and order. The order of operation in art is just as much physical as it is from the medulla oblongata.
The performative aspects of art are only a fraction of its opportunity cost. Much is lost in the performance of certain art because many people don’t know how to perform their art live. That’s why recorded music with producers, mixing, mastering, and other precise treatments often sounds so drastically different than live performances. To qualify, there aren’t many performers who can be as captivating in a live performance as they are on a polished record. It’s common for artists to be lacking in their ability to perform their art to its fullest quality/value live based on uncontrolled nerves, variable conditions, etc. Now that people have YouTube and other broadly accessible instructive methods that do the work for them, there has been a resurgence in live recordings. The artist population overall is improving and becoming more practiced in the live aspect of their work. It’s important to identify, however, that there is a handicap inherent in this contemporary approach.
People like myself did not grow up with YouTube and had to learn music and instruments by deconstructing, reconstructing, and playing by ear. The result is a different type of connection that gives architects like me a competitive advantage over people who learn by less tangible and granular means. I don’t think that’s negative or “less than”, but I have observed that the latter is not as effective in the long term. Of course, any artist coming up today can attain the same competitive advantage I enjoy by choosing to immerse themselves in the granular, technical, and physical aspects of their instrument(s) of choice outside of the abundant “done for you” tools, resources, and sounds available today.
In the future, I see a resurgence of live performance quality as a result of the trends in social media and people favoring and displaying their raw talent, the execution/packaging of it, and how it aligns with the bigger picture. That’s what the future is going to be in my view. It’s no longer just displays of speed and agility or “look at me, I’m so amazing.”
Because of technology, we lost a lot of performance elements that existed in prior generations of music, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Few people today can truly move their audience with a live performance, which is an opportunity cost that I hope will recover.
People often become exasperated by how factual they feel their subjectivity is on the subject of art. They do this as if there is some kind of winner in art. In my rare view, there is no winning in art. You can only participate. Layering any form of external competition over art is not a quantifiable fact but simply a form of entertainment.
Entertainment is a crude measurement of art and personality. While it can be entertaining, art is not synonymous with entertainment. Entertainment is merely one outcome that is the superficial result of performance based on the economics of illusion, never the skill of practice in the failed attempt to make perfect art. There are many other purposes of art, such as education, evocation, provocation, commentary, aesthetics, wellness, community-building, and even infrastructure. Wherever imagination takes a fixed form in the physical world, there is a form of art.
