Lmao how is this real, “the ambient sounds of the world were
wrong, sir
”
Imagine paying Columbia-amounts of money to be taught by someone with kindergarten-level art literacy. Like, motherfucker, the wholeass
point of 4’33” is to emphasize how every performance of live music is inextricably linked to the ambient sounds of the context in which it is performed!!!!!!!
Paying attention to and thinking about thecontext of the performance is the point of the song!!!! If the point was to hear birds chirping and people walking,
John Cage would have fucking recorded that instead. Insisting that art is only good when contains good things and makes you feel good things is baby-level art criticism. How the fuck is this dude a professor.
The very same attitude is at the core of the so-called “anti ideology” that wants to censor fiction by applying puritanical morals.
The professor doesn’t want to face the protests outside of his lecture hall, that’s why he decides they’re not worthy to become subject of his class, as if that made those protests somehow less relevant.*
The anti ideology doesn’t want to face the more uncomfortable realities of life, that’s why it forbids everyone to engage with the concepts it deems “impure”, as if that made the icky stuff go away.
*even without knowing what these protests were about, they are socially relevant when they become this disruptive, whether we like it or not.
tldr; if you don’t want to hear what the world around you sounds like, don’t listen to 4’33”, but don’t tell others to shut their ears.
