Comment by _petronius
7 days ago
Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time.
It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.
Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)
I'm not disagreeing with you, but you should invert the question and think about it.
In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to commit to the project you won't see through, it has a significance to those people making the commitment. What becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also hard to ask "why are we doing this?"
In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in providing a property that they will own, but I could just as well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively changes the living and working future of the parents.
There's always an opportunity cost to making art. Taking your argument to it's extreme people should never paint or make music but instead spend all their time growing food and building homes (and distributing those goods because that's a big crux, we could feed everyone on the planet if we got food to the right people).
The cool thing about freedom is that we don't have to be rational monks that are slave to economic utilitarism.
This conundrum comes up sometimes in the context of generational starships, about intermediate generations being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.
Alastair Reynolds' book Chasm City touches on a bunch of this, in particular the class warfare angle of some wealthy travelers getting to enjoy the journey in peaceful cryosleep while the poor ones pay for their passage in servitude.
> being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.
This isn't really so different from being born on Earth, except that we take being born on Earth for granted, and the population is really really big.
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I spend too much time thinking about all the stuff that can go wrong on generation ships.
You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.
You spent generations expecting to be bold explorers pushing the frontier and getting to claim nice territory, and you show up to find you’re in second place.
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Heinlein also tackled some of these problems with generation ships in Orphans of the Sky[1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky
That's the beauty of a long-term commitment. You are stating so much confidence about the future that you say "yes, we can have a functioning society and set aside these resources".
Sure, you can create scenarios were that fails. You can do that for anything. The power lies in saying "we are willing to remove these paths from consideration because we as a people are committed to not letting them occur".
It's a model that fails if you apply first-order utilitarian calculus. But the intangible value of the hope and commitment in it likely overshadows any immediate gain. This isn't about how to maximize utilization or optionality. It's a bold statement about who we are, and a lodestar to aspire to. (Which is, ultimately, the job art does)
> In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
We have plenty of examples where this has already happened. Traditions that were maintained at significant cost in the face of difficulties or opposition. Caretakers of something ancient who struggle to find an heir. We tend to view them positively.
> Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property.
I suspect this has been misreported. Japanese mortgage terms are pretty normal and property prices are much lower than in the west (even the bubble only really affected central Tokyo). There's a practice of an elderly parent being able to get a mortgage that's then "inherited" by a child, in cases where the parent is retired or close to retirement, but it's pretty much a face-saving (and tax-avoidance) measure.
They couldn’t even quarry the Washington Monument out of a single color of stone. It’s not that visible in pictures but if you go see it on a sunny day it’s hard to ignore that stupid line in the middle.
If you take too long building a cathedral the quarry might exhaust itself in the meantime. So even if you keep to the design it might not look right.
> The outside facing consists, due to the interrupted building process, of three different kinds of white marble.
For some cathedrals that visible mismatch in the materials might be a feature, not a bug.
At least that's the case for the co-cathedral in Zamora, Michoacán which had its construction interrupted for almost a century due to the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War and its subsequent expropriation by the government. In this context, the mismatching facade remains as a testament of the building's history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocesan_Sanctuary_of_Our_Lady...
Maybe a crisis will occur and maybe our descendants will have to make a tough choice, but that could enrich the story of the performance. If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business. The hopes and desires of one generation can only hold sway over the next for so long.
> If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business.
Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the tickets for.
Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems like a potential scam in that sense.
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It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.
It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course.
They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
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Most of them don't value hard science either.
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Ok but why would you need a "humanities course" to appreciate art?
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I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally wack.
I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music.
Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music.
I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line.
Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech and you can see this in how technology develops.
Google Translate renders this in English as "Specialist idiots" and I like that.
But that word equally describes artists
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I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece is completely externalized to the identity of its author and the history of its composition and cannot be derived from observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.
> Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics.
That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that.
Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".
This is an incredibly reductive dismissal of a very diverse group of people who don't find Cage's art in particular to be meaningful.
Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once.
I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit.
I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
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I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation.
I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation.
Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
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It's a neat goal to keep an organ playing for hundreds of years. I just don't think that's related to the musical composition itself, which is not impressive to me. The fact that Cage added the phrase "as slow as possible" is not, in my opinion, musically interesting.
It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.
Cage created art that transcends music and you are rightfully noting that it is not that impressive when judged solely on musical merit.
It’s like saying a dodecahedron isn’t that impressive when viewed sitting on a 2D plane because it’s just a triangke and there are more interesting 2D shapes. True, but so reductive it’s tautological.
In what way does it transcend music? What other form of art, other than music, is he operating in?
Yeah, something has been lost in current generations. I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation books where the protagonist dies at the beginning but leaves behind the foundations of a thousand-year plan to rebuild civilisation after the collapse that he predicts including a time capsule that opens following predicted crises.
I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all.
This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.
Some Anathem vibes too!
Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".
Assume you already know about this given your interests, but just in case: https://longnow.org/
And while it may be contemporary avant garde now, by the time the performance is finished, it will be a timeless classic.
Does the ticket come with a snorkeling set?
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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you have ever dabbled in philosophy at all, your notion of “real art” would be the first thing you would have to challenge.
“What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.
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Cage died in 1992 , this is not contemporary art
> Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art