On naturality and innate talent in art
Then I heard a man giving a demonstration of Indian vocal music, and his pitch was so perfect, I went rushing up to him afterwards to ask how he did it.
I said, “How are you able to hit the notes so perfectly dead-on? Are you just natually good at this?”
He said, “No! When I first started singing, not only was I not within an inch of the note - I wasn’t within a football field of the note! I was horrible!”
“So how did you do it?”
He jabbed a finger in my chest, and looked me in the eye. “Practice. Thousands of hours of practice, and eventually I got it. I can show you how.”
Derek Sivers and the secret for being good at what you do. TRY and never give up!
Intresting though that’s another culture (than his) that remember to Derek and to us that art was (also) a highy technical process made up of constant application.
When we lost this aspect we ended with a weaker art, completely cut from praxis and everyday lfe. What consequences this separation bring? And does industrialisation facilitate this process? Now, industrialisation is a kind of praxis, a disembodyed one, but still, so how a process supposed to automatically reproduct practice and savoir-faire could affect the development of modern/contemporary art that’s a quite intellectual activity?
The Bauhaus experience comes to mind as a great attempt to summarize art and mass production, thought the experiment didn’t follow the way founder would. Today Bauhaus manufacts are all but affordable industrialised production.
Walter Benjamin could help here with his concept of lost of halo that he uses for both mass production art and avant-garde; this lost of the magical essence of art that protected her could be use for politics to take control of art production, in spite of religion that ruled (a part of) art until modernity: art, freed from cults practices would play a political role. But here we find a vision of art as a gift that fall from hight to bottom following a up->down logic that’s not really universal, as we see in the case of the Indian singer.
Strip down the magic halo from art wasn’t only a victory of rationality over religious obscurantism but represented also the fracture between art and practice, the art activity being claimed by political power as a way to develop democracy (or tyranny). But what succes can we expect from a democratisation that remove praxis (and thus collective)generated meanings?
So is praxis (art in the Indian singer sense) the only art that assure a full and meaningful art and her democratisation?
