#4 In an age when a supposedly prominent composer like John Cage can pawn off four minutes and thirty seconds of total silence as a written work of piano music—and then have his estate go on to successfully prevail in court for copyright infringement against a composer who did essentially the same thing—the word "art" no longer carries the connotations of beauty, skill, mastery or a refined sense of esthetics. Instead we are treated to obtuse slackers whose gratuitously offensive, provocative or titillating hogwash receives critical praise rivaled only by that given the emperor's new clothes.
Here is some background on the "4:33" copyright case:
(Try not to laugh or cry too hard.)
"4'33" consists of a musician (or musicians), not playing their instruments for four minutes and 33 seconds, and was intended as an ambient experience rather than four minutes and 33 seconds of silence - the music is the shuffling and coughing of the musician(s) and the audience and the background hum of the performance venue - the instructions are about the conducting of silence and the demeanor of the musician(s). "This is a deeply personal music," says moron critic Peter Gutmann, "which each witness creates to his/her own reactions to life. Concerts and records standardize our responses, but no two people will ever hear 4'33" the same way. It's the ultimate sing-along: the audience (and the world) becomes the performer."
But there is a copyright on the score - or rather, the several versions of the score that Cage produced over the years - because, of course, silence is never absolute nor complete, and every period of silence has different qualities of background noise. Like music, a song or instrumental piece, each silence is played differently at each performance and these variations are hard to quantify. Like software, the sound of silence is better when subjected to version control, and John Cage, or rather his music publishers, Peters Edition, now own the copyright to silence - or, at least, four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
None of this would have mattered, but in 2002 a group known as The Planets (consisting of eight musicians, though there were then said to be nine planets - Pluto has since fallen out of planetary orbit and is now an arbitrary rock floating in space), led by Mike Batt, whose claims to fame as a composer include the music of The Wombles, and the song Bright Eyes from the film Watership Down, topped the UK classical charts with an album called Classical Graffiti, which included a track called A One Minute Silence. The track, which is silent, is credited to Batt/Cage, which Mike Batt admitted was intended as a "tongue-in-cheek dig at the John Cage piece", although he later claimed that the credits referred to his previously unknown pseudonymous alter ego, Clint Cage.
This didn't escape the notice of Peters Edition who, acting on behalf of the Cage Estate, contacted Batt and claimed infringement of copyright. Peters Edition asked for a quarter of the royalties, presumably on the grounds that the duration of A One Minute Silence approximates to a quarter of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
The case of Peters Edition was supported by the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society who demanded that Batt cough up for the use of Cage's original work. Batt, however, claimed that his piece was qualitatively different because the recorded silence consists of the absence of noise, rather than the presence of ambient silence.
"I certainly wasn't quoting his silence. I claim my silence is original silence... Our's is better silence", he said, "it's digital. Their's is only analogue."
The scores were also different. According to another moron critic named Steven Poole, writing in The Guardian, Cage's score consisted "merely of vertical ruled lines marked with timings”, whereas Batt's piece “is written in the key of G major (or E minor), and is more structurally complex, finishing with a flourish of metre-switching from five-eight to three-eight four-four. These are obviously quite different pieces of music", a distinction that would have amused Cage himself.
The Planets' album was a bestseller, which may have influenced the decision of Peters Edition and the Cage estate. As Batt pointed out: "This is not an angry dispute - it's a gentlemanly dispute. But there is money involved."
The obvious conclusion to be drawn was that the motive for the case may have been publicity, with some advantage to all parties. But this appears not to have been the case because the bizarre legal wrangle ended with a six-figure out-of-court settlement.
And there you have it: Silence masquerading as music. Shit parading as art. A mass produced urinal or a bed strewn with condoms and empty liquor bottles are passed off as sculpture.
Remember that Duchamp's "Fountain" is valued at $3,600,000 and Emin's "My Bed" sold for a mere $225,000. The foregoing and gangsta rap's international popularity all stand as bleak testimony to how thoroughly demagnetized this world's artistic compass is.
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Politicians and artists have condemned a German archbishop who described modern art as “degenerate”, the term used by the Nazis in their persecution of artists. Cardinal Joachim Meisner, archbishop of Cologne, said art which had no link to religion was “entartete Kunst”, a term that in German has strong connotations linked to the Third Reich and its ban on paintings and other culture. “When culture becomes disconnected from religion, from the worship of God, religion becomes ritualism and the culture becomes degenerate,” Cardinal Meisner said in a sermon in Cologne Cathedral on Friday. Meisner, 73, was commenting on the opening of an exhibition of medieval and medieval and modern art from the diocese’s art collection. “To use the word ‘degenerate’ in relation to art, as Cardinal Meisner did, is a serious faux pas,” Richter told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Other politicians in North Rhine-Westphalia were appalled by the cardinal’s words. The Nazis removed or banned an estimated 20,000 works of art, especially Expressionist art, from German museums after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Edvard Munch were persecuted and stigmatised.