Pablo Massa wrote in response to me:

>Robert Peters:
>
>>That is the great adventure of art: to always and boldly find new ways to
>>say old things and to find the adequate artistic expression for the present
>>time
>
>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.

>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.

>This may sound horrible to you, but the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber
>is a perfect artistic expression of this times.

It doesn't sound horrible to me, it simply sounds wrong.  His music is
smooth, shallow entertainment, not more and not less.  I bet all my money
that the musicologists of the 22nd century will not know his name anymore
and think of other composers as "the perfect artistic expression" of the
late 20th century.

>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)?

But to me art THAT COUNTS (and that is not, like Lloyd-Webbers stuff,
sheer entertainment) is bold and adventurous and the great masters (Mozart,
Beethoven, Rembrandt, Picasso, Dante, Pound and the likes) were bold
characters who stretched the limits of art.  (And who didn't care what
anybody else had to say about their works:  commitment to art was the
judge, nothing else.)

Robert Peters
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