Robert Clements wrote:

>Molotov cocktail-throwing mode: on.  Has Jon (or anyone else) every
>heard of an self-proclaimed experimental artist accepting that a work was
>a failure because the audience judged against it?

Of course not.  But the artist's role is not to judge the value of her/his
productions, it's to produce them.  The public's job is to evaluate them.
That's one difference between art and science.  Since science tries to find
out the truth about things, scientists whose hypotheses turn out to be
wrong cheerfully (usually) admit to being wrong, whereas in art everyone
has the perfect right to have any opinion they want to about the value of
a work.  Of course, artists do criticize their own work very often, but
they very seldom cave in to criticism from the public, and certainly not
from critics!

>Most contemporary audience members tolerate a greater degree of what the
>average 19th century listener would consider dissonance, to use only the
>most obvious example; but does that _really_ make _Tristan und Isolde_
>experimental?

Actually, Liszt, I believe, was the experimenter here, since if I'm not
mistaken Wagner stole the famous opening chord, especially, from good old
Franz.  But I would certainly consider Liszt an experimental composer, yes.

>While Popper's definition of falsifiability is extremely precise (not so
>surprising; since he's building an ideal of intellectual process around it)
>& therefore an ideal in itself; it does reflect the general assumption that
>to call something an experiment means your running the risk of failure
>(like launching a rocket nowadays, say).  For a number of reasons, this
>limiting assumption hasn't be honestly translated to the term's usage in
>the arts (not just contemporary CM, i should add); which is why i feel it
>should be struck from the record....

I still don't understand what's "dishonest" about using the term
"experimental" in a somewhat different sense in art from the way it's used
in science.  Cage put it very clearly in his essay "History of Experimental
Music in the United States," in _Silence_: "What is the nature of an
experimental action? It is simply an action the outcome of which is not
foreseen." That's what experimental art is: the artist tries something
that hasn't been tried before, so she/he can't foresee how it will turn
out.  But if it weren't for experimental art, in this sense, we'd still be
drawing on cave walls with charcoal, or whatever they used back then, and
our music would be whatever they sang and played.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]