I just puked

shubertmaniac, interesting summary of the last few hundred years. I would be hard pressed to argue any of the points you made. I would only say that artists don't create for the money. Money is a byproduct of their occasional success. We could all name hundreds of 'artists' who were unsuccessful during their lifetime, only to be lauded for having the foresight to die.

Art isn't defined by who recognizes it, but there remains the idea that if it has to be explained to a person of above average intelligence, is it really art or self promoting fluff?

Some people create what is in the depths of their being while other produce what will turn a fast and profitable buck.

I don't begrudge the creative whore their dollar, but I won't call it art either.

I don't know how much of the music created and then heard in the last six thousand years was art though. Most of it is self promotion. The radio has been and still is full of this promotion. Most art probably goes unheard.

I think art is more motivation than execution. And a lot of the musicians around now should be executed!

I agree with Onhyw61(love that Dylan reference)that the talented should receive the fruits of their labors but in our culture there is a disproportionate reward for talent.To parapharse Bono, "Three chords and the truth" It's more like three chords and millions of dollars.

I never thought it was the truth that Bono struggled with rather the three chords...............

The rewards (monetary and otherwise) for success can be enormous in American culture. To say it's disproportionate can start that slide down the proverbial slippery slope. 99.99% of the world's population would argue that the audio systems of Audiogon members are "disproportionate" and reflect the excesses of people with way too much money for their own good. Imagine if the majority of people in the world restricted us few audiophiles to Bose Waves and made us donate our disproportionate excess to some worthwhile charity like clean drinking water in the sub-Saharan or eliminating AIDs in southeast Asia? The world would be more proportionate (and healthier), but would it really be more fair. Free choice can be a double sided sword, but it's alternatives are far worst.

Onhwy61: I disagree concerning that A'goners spend to much money or a disproportionate amount on audio equipment. In fact we spend too little. A'goners are the last remnants of the cultural elite. We need to hone our skills as the last outpost in this fast becoming vast wasteland of culture. Hegel once pondered whether high art was historically conditioned. That is in only in a particular time in a particular place, and perhaps for only a short time frame, high art would be nurtured and flower only to fade away like all ideas and civilizations. High Art at one time had something to say about the condition of man or mankind. Beethoven's 9th Symphony, definitively and decisively made a statement about the then curent condition that man/mankind was in. The music communicated. After Mahler's titanic symphonies
and Wagner's music dramas, music was frustrating to everyone, composers, audiences, critics. In a way Beethoven legacy haunted all composers: Schubert envied him so much that he was buried nesxt to him. Wagner could not write a symphony because the 9th said it all. The symphonic form was used up, Mahler just made it more titanic and personal at the same time. Schoenberg came along saw the mess that music was in. The diatonic scales had been corrupted, everthing was chromatically disfunctional. He set it straight by going to absolute atonality ( Schoenberg prefered pantonal, then he developed the 12 tone system, almost perfected by Webern). Of course, some of the astute composers loved it, but it surely lost its audience. The music no longer communicated to the masses, or to society. So in some ways, this situation, created "new music". The composer was no longer constrained, to concern itself with the masses, the high art of music could become autonomous, truly absolute music. It no longer became consumable art, it no longer had to have one eye on the consumption by the masses. It freed it self. But the cost was high, mass culture assumed the mantle of all culture not because high culture had anything to say, but said it in a very negative way, it was longer a utopian future, like Beethoven's 9th, but a more profund inward, almost psychologically focused aesthetic. ( it is interesting that in Vienna in the 1920s you had both Schoenberg and Freud, meeting in coffeehouses, you wonder what they talked about!) Is there high art now? YES! It is there if you want it, it is not hard to find. It is not on the Billboard's TOP 200 of clssical music, but it is there. So is it selfish to want to have the "best" audio equipment? The real question for you, is high culture to be stamped out, and trampled upon by the culture industry. Is it not worth saving too. If there is no higher ground to take, or a higher cultured life to save or be a part of then what is the worth of that charity if the very civilization
and culture you cherish is polluted, diluted and destroyed?