2stepfan said:
I think the proposition that better art comes from not practicing doesn't really hold water.
And I think that the notional divide between art and artifice isn't sustainable.
And the dualism of "good art" vs "bad art" won't wash either.
You don't like Dali? Fuck, Magritte's next!
i'm not proposing that "better" art comes from not practising. to clarify i mean "good" in the sense of "true", "honest", "ethical" as opposed to the term necessarily being a qualititative assesment. though (speaking subjectively) i think i tend to come down on the side of "good art" over "bad art"
as for the the divide between art and artifice. well, it's less a divide than an incline. i'm not coming down in favour of de kooning and rothko per se, just remarking that foregrounding the materiality of the construction is an aesthetic necessity. saying that "properly-made" art will inevitably wear it's own construction like a badge, in the same manner a meandering river will leave behind an oxbow lake.
as effay points out, CB DID lock the magic band in a house and get them to work away, but the result he was intent on was closer to brainwashing. he wanted his band all to play like him, so they could collectively improvise as though they were figments of his imagination. as for himself, he NEVER practised, was militant about it. but yeah, i'll grudgingly concede there is some element of a priori organisation, he would hum them their parts certainly.
practise is anathema isnt it? i mean who here actually writes anything but from the top of their head? that's how i write! i get all the necessary raw info in hand and then splurge, maybe a bit of tidying up at the end. it's the only way to write isnt it? you jump up in the air, do your funny move, and land. end of story.
i do all my comics and pictures the same way. as an animator on the other hand, i've been trained not to work "straightahead" as it's called, and work with "keys" (defining each end of a shot, and drawing "inbetweens") but actually i think my animations have tended to be quite stilted. my next project (if i ever get time to do it) is going to be done in an improvisational manner. planning just ruins art. dali's art is clearly intensely planned and, to me at least, it looks just that, flat and dead. you have to let the energy flow through you, you can't dam it up.
the trick is, i suppose (ahem) to have such a tight rein on your baser mores that you can just lay it down without recourse to noodling or repetition. i suppose everyone is thinking "derek bailey", but no, what about the minutemen. one take. or bug kahn and the plastic jam. made in three minutes. the beatles didn't practise in hamburg, they played their level best every night.
really paul, i'm surprised that you of all people (a disciple of magick!) are so hostile to this. i think your point about magritte (who's a bit chocolate boxy) is slightly by-the-by. it's more about how you get from a to b, from idea to manifestation. though an over-polished turd the like of which dali produced is a sure sign of planning run rampant.
to return to FZ. zappa is so in thrall with an afterimage of "famous dead composer" that he ends up writing scores!!! gasps! what a moron! that's why classical music is so fucked! it relies for any life-force upon genius interpreters like menuhin to figure out some way of invigorating it. as any fule kno in the days when classical music really was alive the composer/performer was far more prevalent and the score was probably more of an afterthought.
as a final thought, this detachedness from the evidence of creation is almost certainly why modern electronica is going backwards. the whole "infinite palatte of sound" that electronic instruments provide these days is antithetical to delineating the process of creation itself. the sound of an orchestra can be conjoured at the press of a button, the act devoid of any representative energy, and thus empty of significance. the sounds themselves "untrue", "fake". no wonder grime's playstation approach makes so much more artistic sense, there is a conspicuous materiality to the sound.