It is Monday and a slow news day. Everybody still writing about the Superbowl and personally I am so over it. But deadlines must be reached, etc. so I am looking through my notes for something to write about and I found this quote from Art historian Alexandra Munroe, "Music is social not just aesthetic".
I am guessing I noted it in response to Alyson's column about how artists don't have to be receptive to their audience. Which was in response to my claiming that they do have to entertain their audience. The truth is, if rockers are great artists it is not simply secondary to them being great entertainers, it is, indeed, irrelevant to them being great rockers.
So many indie rock bands, big names, go all shy in front of an audience. They don't know what to say or they think would , say, Jackson Pollock do a jig while painting? If not, why should they act like performing monkeys? Well, first, off, I saw a film of Pollock dripping paint on a canvas and it was at the least very entertaining. And second, an artist is not a performer. Performers perfom. Artists art. When you look at the art, the artist isn't painting it in front of you. If they were, it would be their responsibility to add the "performance" into the art. Thus performance art.
Look, one person's purgatory is another person's pleasure zone, but if your idea of pleasure is boredom you are certainly an aberration of the norm. Call it the Louis Armstrong school of rock and roll dynamics. Deal with the social and the aesthetic will follow. Forget that rule at your peril.