The Virtue of Exclusivity in the Avant-Garde

My senses are in ecstasy. As I look around the gallery, I see the most beautiful fractal

imagery I have ever seen – all created from the images of my laptop's screensaver. It is, as one

critic noted, beyond art, vivid and beautiful like nothing else. As I walk around, the floor speaks

to me, creating new stories as I go: “We are the ones of metal and bone / who sold the Earth for

a metal stone / When all is said and done, the battle is won, and the stone is nothing less than

earth.” The lights flash, illuminating the grandiose year-2150-esque architecture. The floor I am

on is made of pods, arranged in concentric circles with glass walls so thin and clear that you

would think they could never hold you in. In the center stands a circular pillar of light, going

through the colors of the rainbow as it reaches for the sky. I have never felt so much a part of an

artwork before. Everything here was made just for me; truly much of it could never have come

into being without my participation.

I fly down to the base of the gallery. The levitating “Node Zero Gallery” signs stop

spinning and change color on my command. My name is Zach Warwillow, and I am a Second

Life avatar1.

Art has always been the most important symbol of culture, a constant mirror of

civilization, but as I explore the Node Zero Gallery, I see very little – if any – culture or diversity.

The building is glass and titanium; circular and made of pods. It could not be more a

stereotypical building of the future: cold and devoid of humanity. It would appear that the

1 Second Life (SL) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), an internet-based
virtual world. Any human with computer and internet access can sign up for SL for free and create an
avatar to represent him/her. Avatars, under the direction of their user, can interact, build, buy, trade, have
babies, and so on. Still, Second Life was created as an explicitly a non-Utopian society because of its
bottom-up development. It has no Utopian agenda because the entire world is user-generated. Anybody
and everybody can log into SL and create not only their own avatar, but part of the infinite SL world as
well.
museum, or at least one of the artists, even recognizes it, as I recall the story created as I walked

through “Unnatural Objects”: “We are the ones of metal and bone / who sold the Earth for a

metal stone,” seemingly telling us that we're replacing the natural with the artificial.

But even the interactive exhibits that explicitly try to remedy the lack of culture, like

Sheep Vortex, necessarily fail. Sheep Vortex takes the users' idle cycles (screen savers, if you

will) and mashes them into animated fractals. The result is brilliant, and the art does to an extent

bring one's culture of RL into SL. Yet even here the only culture reflected is my own in a series

of algorithmically arranged fractals. I am left with no diverse experience, only sensory overload.

Even Second Life creator Philip Rosedale acknowledges that there is almost no

translation between culture in RL and culture in SL, though he simply says to “give it some

time.” He contends that since all content is user-generated, artwork will come sooner or later

that will reflect RL culture.

This is the dream of globalization. That lifting the barriers between cultures (usually via

the Internet) will unite them all and leave an extraordinary amalgam of human experiences -- a

true melting pot.

Second Life is the pursuit of that dream, and evidence of its pitfalls.

Why, then, does Second Life have no chance? It has done everything right. There are

built-in automatic translators so that any two people can converse in different languages. There

is no geographic boundary, no racial boundary, no religious boundary between people.

The measure of success, however, has always and will always be the same. Success is

measured by popularity, sales, and accessibility. And thus the key to success always remains the

same as well: appeal to the common aspects of humanity. The ventures that succeed are those

that reach the greatest number of people, by putting aside what makes us unique and focusing
only on what is the same. This necessarily eliminates cultural diversity, which is at heart the

celebration of our differences. A work can achieve true universality in two ways. It can be

shallow, stripped down to the bare bones that humanity shares. Or, it can be profound,

encompassing all of the differences and variation in the human experience. Unfortunately, the

former is far easier, far more practical, and far more abundant.

When we think of Real Life globalization, we immediately think of the McDonaldses of

the world: everything is prepackaged, the same everywhere, franchised, and standardized. By

definition when something is standardized, it loses its uniqueness. Sure, it could be argued that

McDonalds represents the American culture, but it would be more accurate to say that

McDonalds is itself a new culture. The McDonalds logo has in fact achieved universal

recognition, but in doing so, it has left behind the culture it came from and started its own culture

of standardization, just like Second Life has abandoned human culture for its new, virtual techno-

culture. What we see has happened, however, is that in the Second Life preview of Real Life

globalization, even art has fallen victim to this quest for universality.

Interestingly enough, the classical music world's commercial “death” may actually offer

a solution.

At the turn of the twentieth century, classical music was reaching the end of its golden

age. With Schoenberg's introduction of twelve-tone composition (a technique where every pitch

has equal prominence in a piece, thereby contributing to an overall atonality), classical music

became less and less accessible to the general public. Today, “new music is at an impasse—you

can't convince people it exists...the official line is, classical music is finished, a closed book,

Glass, Reich, and maybe John Zorn the end of history.” Classical music is down to 100 public

radio stations, fewer recitals are being given, and there are talks of live concerts dying altogether.
The days of the Mozart sonata in Carnegie Hall have come to pass.

Stravinsky wrote in The Poetics of Music, “Our vanguard elite, sworn perpetually to

outdo itself, expects and requires that music should satisfy the taste for absurd cacophony.” And

that's exactly what Stravinsky's music did. His masterpiece Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of

Spring) is an incredibly exciting if hard to listen to epic of absurd cacophony. It starts out

peacefully, even contemplatively and a piacere. Yet “The Adoration of the Earth” turns quickly

into “Dances of the Young Girls” a movement of repetitive, militant, loud, and uneasy bangs. It

is relentless and tiring for both performer and listener. Part I ends uneasily on an upbeat and Part

II does little to resolve the feeling. As I experience the “Sacrificial Dance” that closes The Rite

of Spring, I am jarred to say the least. The lay listener would necessarily be taken aback by the

piece if it is performed correctly – the portrayal of Spring as relentless, chaotic, and often plain

evil betrays the mood of the opening bassoon solo. The performer, on the other hand, loves the

ride like a good roller coaster, as scary as the music gets. He relishes the novelty of the

discordant harmonies. As the final dance goes from 2/16 to 3/16 to 5/16 to 2/8 and back again,

all without a downbeat, he prays for the end, wholly absorbed in the music. He is enraptured by

the sharp dynamic contrasts and seething dissonance of the final chord which finally puts an end

to the rhythmic misery. The uneducated listener, if not captured by the opening notes, probably

would (and for that matter, should) run.

But the “difficult” and “unintelligible” works of the twentieth century were not just

unpopular, they were extremely controversial. Fist fights would break out after concerts, and

applause would have to compete with boos. The Rite of Spring is even said to have incited a riot

at its premiere. Yes, composers the likes of Webern, Berg, Boulez, Stravinsky and Schoenberg

have now gained respect from the classical music community, but just think that Schoenberg's
most famous work remains the gargantuan Gurre-Lieder, an accessible but uninnovative and

even neo-Romantic composition.

The classical music of today is certainly less accessible to the lay listener, and one must

wonder if avant garde art can achieve success if it cannot reach the general public. In his

seminal essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” American composer Milton Babbitt acknowledges

classical music's so-called “fall from musical innocence” and calls for an end of writing for the

lay listener, what Stravinsky called in The Poetics of Music, “a tendency to turn the mind away

from what I shall call the higher mathematics of music in order to degrade music to servile

employment and to vulgarize it by adapting it to the requirements of an elementary

utilitarianism.” After all, mathematicians do not research for the lay mathematician but only for

other advanced mathematicians. By analogy, there is no problem writing advanced music only

for the appreciation of other advanced composers. In fact, Babbitt advocates a view whereby

new music is for, of, and by specialists. The revolutionary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould even

stopped performing concerts (in favor of recording, which he did only to make money) towards

the end of his life because he was uncomfortable with the artist-audience relationship.

Under this view, classical music is not dead, simply unpopular, but more advanced and

profound than ever. Mathematics underwent a similar transition (though millenia ago) between

the period when everyone was a true mathematician and when only the experts appreciated

mathematics. But mathematics is not dead today. Not everyone is an expert in classical music

like they were until the early 20th century. Classical music has just recently moved in complexity

beyond the comprehension of the layman as mathematics did back in its day. Like Babbitt, I

reject the notion that “the lay listener, by virtue of some undefined, transcendental faculty,

always is able to arrive at a musical judgment absolute in its wisdom if not always permanent in
its validity.”

By accepting avant-garde music as “specialized,” classical music can – and has begun to

– flourish in the same way that advanced scientific research has.

How, then, does this help us solve the deculturalization rampant within “globalized” art?

There is a simple message to be taken from the classical music world: abandon universality and

avoid the “vulgar elementary utilitarianism” that Stravinsky so despised.

This will no doubt be difficult advice for artists to handle. The golden standard has for

ages been that in order to make a difference in the world, you need to reach as many people as

possible. I believe that it is now the case that a deeper but narrower work will have more impact

than a wider but shallower one. The ideal, of course, would be to find an effective compromise,

but this seems unlikely; the avant-garde art world is known for making big statements and

compromise seems to have the unspoken connotation of “boring.”

Further distilled under the umbrella of globalization, this gives light to a new suggestion:

don't abandon your culture in search of something common and universal. But what does this

entail? Remaining a “specialist” in your culture or area of expertise as Babbitt recommends

would certainly preserve and potentially augment culture in a new globalized world. However,

at the same time by reducing the audience of French paintings to nobody but experts on French

painting and other French painters, there would be a considerably decreased sharing of culture

with other cultures. In essence, rather than bringing all culture together as is the dream of

globalization, the opposite would occur; all culture would remain separate and specialized. The

isolation that Babbitt strove for would indeed be achieved, but it looks like a bad idea to apply

this to the greater realm of cultural isolation.

If this is the case, the future of globalization looks grim: we are left either with a world
devoid of culture (except possibly a new artificial-feeling technological culture) or we are left

with the cultural isolation that is the antithesis of globalization.

And so we return once more to the avant-garde art world, this time to pay a visit to Chris

Burden's “Shoot.” It depicts two men standing in a poorly lit room, both standing, about fifteen

feet apart. They look at each other calmly. One man holds a rifle and then shoots the other one

in the left arm. The man that is shot, Chris Burden, grabs his arm where he's been shot and

walks away. The scene ends. The entire clip is probably only about fifteen seconds long, but

doesn't fail to leave a lasting impression. The tale is one of an isolation both literal and

figurative. The viewer experiences the profound separation of a man physically unreachable and

unhelpable because of a glass wall in the way. Burden holds himself there, masochistically, in

the name of art. Even if the viewer cannot conceive of any other motive for Chris Burden to do

this, there is one thing the viewer can take away from it: a deep personal conviction. He sets

himself up as an artwork as if to say “I'm so serious about this I'll do this no matter what.”

What I am left with, then, is the following only partially satisfying conclusion: do

whatever you want; it's a matter of purely personal choice to isolate yourself artistically. In the

end, I advocate a view that the greatness or success of a work cannot be judged by its popularity,

but rather must be judged by its impact. If your art is about personal expression, don't worry

about the audience. If your art is about moving the masses, continue on the quest for

universality. A word of caution, however: in searching for universality, it is better to

acknowledge the differences between cultures and incorporate as many as you see fit rather than

appeal to only what is common. We cannot afford a world without differences.

Some sources...

http://www.artsjournal.com/artswatch/aw-deathofclassical.htm

http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html

http://www.cis.vt.edu/modernworld/d/poetics.html

http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/002812.php

http://hifidreams.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg

Rite of Spring: Boosey & Hawkes ed. Reduction for Piano Duet

Rite of Spring: Simon Rattle, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-01-09/music/death-wish/1