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Pablo Massa <[log in to unmask]>
Tue, 19 Sep 2000 23:11:29 -0300
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Robert Peters in response to me:

>>Dou you think that a live artist can be of other kind than a contemporary
>>one?.
>
>Oh, there are enough who try to ignore the world around them and the times
>they live in.

Read again the question; you will find that it's merely rethorical.
All those artists who "try to ignore the world around them etc." are
contemporary precisely because of this.  Let's suppose that, in XXIII
century, some musicologists finds near the ruins of my house, here in
Buenos Aires, a couple Masses imitating the style of Dufay and signed by a
guy named Hector Perez (exactly as my neighbor); they will know inmediately
that Hector Perez lived not before the last half of XX century.  Being
contemporary is not an option that you can accept or not:  is a fact.  You
can't run from it, and the older your disguise is, the more syntomatic of
your times becomes your work.  Actually, Romantic artists were also people
who tried to ignore the world around them and the times they lived in.
They were "laudatori temporis acti" in many senses:  remember his his long
walks among ruins and his nostalgy of Middle Age.

>>Artists don't struggle to be modern: they fatally *are*.
>
>You have to define what you mean by "modern".  If you mean by "modern"
>using modernist artistic methods and means your sentence is certainly
>wrong.

Certainly it would be wrong.  I don't know any "modernsit artistic method".
Would you tell me about some?

>>Art is not always an "adventure".  In some cases, art is like an illness:
>>a fact that you must tolerate and, even be "patient" with.
>
>I really do not understand this sentence.  What do you mean by illness (by
>the way: a very dangerous image to be used in connection with art)?

See T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, V, verses 3 & ss.)

Pablo Massa
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