All right, give me a recipe for an infinite loop.

and what does that piece of music sound like?

What would be more artistic is if an orchestra performed this, and the conductor cut it short and berated the 2nd chair trumpet for coming in early.

10 PRINT "I Wanna Be Your Dog"
20 GOTO 10

CP












Music is not art.

Why do artists have to justify their work?

what? I didn't ask you to do anything of the sort. Why don't you think music is art, is all I was asking.

How on earth can you say that? Justify what you just said.

I see 4'33" as several things:

- An attempt to expand the definition of "music." Musicians and composers were already experimenting with what constitutes music by the time Cage composed 4'33" in 1952. The general components of "music"--melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre--had been or soon would be violated, emphasized or deleted altogether in an attempt to find out what was really "music," through serialism, improvisation, chance operations, minimalism, electronic instruments, etc.

And I believe it should be considered music simply because the artist says it is. Like Marcel Duchamp's "readymade" sculptures, store-bought items (a urinal, a bottle rack) to which Duchamp added a signature, 4'33" is music because Cage calls it music. What or whether this music means anything to the listener is up to the listener to decide.

- Inevitable. Cage's piece is abstract expressionism adapted to another medium. Like Robert Rauschenberg's blank white canvases, "painted" only a year before 4'33" premiered and an admitted influence on the piece, Cage reduced music to only two components: a title and a structure (a set length of time). Given all the envelopes being pushed by composers and musicians at the time, it was inevitable that someone would take these experiments to the logical extreme.

(In the end, even this wasn't reductionist enough for Cage: In 1962, Cage wrote a 4'33" No. 2, which is also titled 0'00", "to be performed in any way by anyone". It is a completely different piece. The score, entirely verbal, states, "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action, with any interruptions, fulfilling in whole, or in part, an obligation to others. No two performances are to be of the same action, nor may any action be the performance of a 'musical composition'. No attention is to be given to the situation (electronic, musical, theatrical)." ... "What the piece is trying to say is that everything we do is music, or can become music through the use of microphones..." (http://www.azstarnet.com/~solo/4min33se.htm)

- Conceptual art. And like much conceptual art, the instructions are frequently more "interesting" than the final result. 4'33" is really a thought experiment, a zen koan, on the meaning of music.

- A joke. Cage was a trickster. That 4'33" was at least partially a joke is, I think, established by the fact that it contains three separate movements, lasting 30", 2'23" and 1'40". The original manuscript even listed a tempo of 60 beats per minute.

Whether 4'33" means anything to you is up to the individual, but sometimes reducing an artform to it's bare components can open a window you hadn't perceived before. Brian Eno has tied the genesis of ambient music to, among other things, two seemingly chance events. (If you know your Eno, you've probably heard these stories.) In one, while laid up in bed following an accident, he put on an album of harp music, only to realize once he was back in bed that the volume was far too low and that one channel of the stereo had failed. Too tired to get back up and fix it, he found the seemingly random peaks of volume in the music blending in with the background noise, and this brought an epiphany of another way to listen to music--as part of all sounds, as a musical tint added in.

The other incident found him in Africa, sitting outside at night and playing with a shotgun microphone hooked to headphones. Swinging the mic around, isolating random sounds in the landscape, inspired a way of creating the layers of musical soundscape later found on his Ambient 4: On Land album.

Call it what you will, 4'33" is certainly a building block which has helped lead to many new musical forms.

I maintain that it's boring music.

To me, the whole thing is a gimmick, and Cage didn't exactly create anything. If I were to lead you out to say, Washington and point out Mount Rainier on the landscape, I didn't create anything. I just showed you something that already existed.

How would you apply the 'intent' card to found art?

Fu- your assumption is that you need to create something in order for it to be art. Is that really the case?

Your example of pointing out a view of Mt. Rainier requires that you have some aesthetic sense of what is significant. That sense is unique to you. The person you led out may not have been able to appreciate it until you pointed it out. Is it art?

The definition of art has evolved and changed over time and will continue to change. Some think art is only valid within strict constructs. Whenever you try to define what art is, artists will invariably try to break the definition. The same goes for any form of "art". Whether it's music or literature or any other form.

My question is:
What is the function of art? is it to draw attention to only what is beautiful or is it also to draw attention to what is?

Again, it's not art, because it lacks the creation, intent and perception. If you were to stretch this example to be art, what if I were to point out a dead rat in a garbage can, that would almost definitely be excluded as art by a vast majority of the people out there. And while the majority isn't always right, it greatly limits your audience if they don't agree that it's art.

Art doesn't have to be beautiful, and just because it attracts attention doesn't make it artistic necessarily. Again, I think it's a mix somewhere between the original intent and the perception of the audience. That's also my where I diverge from Lump's assumption that it is music because Cage labels it as such. If I fart twice in 10 minutes in the shower, it ain't music, even if I call it "Concerto (Almost) No. 2".

Can we define what a sport is now?

Are you a sports hater?

No, I was just wondering if you were serious. Sports are easily defined where as art is not. There is no worldwide definition of art. Everyone has a different belief of what it is, which makes it virtually impossible to find an exact and universal manner of defining it.

no they aren't.
i've seen 15+ page arguments about what is a sport and what isn't.

you can have that argument, but i'd take it into a new thread.

what about all the non-puffy but still incredibly awesome rap songs, some of which are the best ever, which take strait loops off songs?