Saturday, September 21, 2019

Nick Cave says...


...when I write a song and release it to the public, I feel it stops being my song. It has been offered up to my audience and they, if they care to, take possession of that song and become its custodian. The integrity of the song now rests not with the artist, but with the listener.

I think this is exactly right. Any work of art worthy of the name finds some kind of escape velocity. It breaks free of the person who created it and carves out a life of its own. The "author" is ultimately just a name that gets attached to it, the way we attach "Homer" to The Iliad, "Beethoven" to the C minor symphony, or "Robert Johnson" to Cross Road Blues. This has always been the way art works upon us.

This applies easily and naturally enough for music, and literature, and painting. But other art forms, film in particular, make the question more complicated. I'm not much of a Michael Jackson fan, but I can certainly listen to "Billie Jean" with pleasure. But I can't watch the video, because I just can't look at the guy without getting creeped out.

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