Reading Blog #2: Searching for Silence

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/searching-for-silence

It’s quite interesting how great works of the past can play into the art of today. With John Cage’s “4’33” ”, this work caused quite a riot as the majority of the song was “silence”. Yet there were many other noises such as the rain and the people leaving. I don’t view this piece as a good piece of art, as there is not much skill required to create this, however, I do believe that this is a great piece of art as it creates discontent, anger, and other various emotions within the viewer, but it also produces many questions: what is silence? Does it exist? What is music? What is art? And so many more. These types of questions allow for more creativity to thrive as people break rules they didn’t know existed. Something that I wonder is why would someone want to recreate this piece of music? People will go into the hall knowing what to expect, therefore there will be little, likely no negative feelings elicited from the performance. Why would someone willingly go to a performance like that too? It seems kind of pretentious. However, I do believe that this displays how the notion of art has changed and grown since. Recreating the piece acts like a little checkpoint. 

I do really appreciate Cage’s approach to art. I believe that he wanted to make strange art that made people question notions that society sets. I think it is something that I want to instill more in my art. I love how he also didn’t spend his whole life doing art and at one point got a lot of financial support from collecting mushrooms, even winning mushroom competitions. It reminds me to just do things I want to do, and eventually everything will work out, and if not, I’ll still have the joy or pain of doing it.