Impermanence 2 - Self Indulgent Art
So, as a follow-up, KZ and I went to see Meredith Monk last night. The quote was from an article about the performance prior to its actually taking place.
Unfortunately, the piece(s) were not up to the concept portrayed in the quote. While there were moments of aural beauty and the lighting had some interesting architectural and sculptural aspects to it, most of the evening was self indulgent, pretentious and meaningless - and put both of us right to sleep.
I've seen Monk before in concerts with the SF Symphony and thought she was interesting and certainly has a vocal range that is amazing for a small woman, but the attempt to be multi-disciplinary and try to weave together media, music, dance (if you could call it that) and performance did not impress us. It felt childish and actually somewhat anti-dance, anti-performance, almost making fun of other disciplines.
It raises the question of whether self-indulgence can ever attain the level of art? Personally, I'm often disturbed by artists that have made a name for themselves and are well regarded attempting to make statements that seem too precocious and cute, as if whatever they do should be taken with seriousness and appreciated because of who they are.
Monk certainly seems to have her devotees if the shouting and applause from a segment of the audience last night is any indication, but it left us cold and I think we were the first ones out the door.
Sometimes you get a hit. Sometimes you get a miss. You just have to keep showing up and hope for the best.
Unfortunately, the piece(s) were not up to the concept portrayed in the quote. While there were moments of aural beauty and the lighting had some interesting architectural and sculptural aspects to it, most of the evening was self indulgent, pretentious and meaningless - and put both of us right to sleep.
I've seen Monk before in concerts with the SF Symphony and thought she was interesting and certainly has a vocal range that is amazing for a small woman, but the attempt to be multi-disciplinary and try to weave together media, music, dance (if you could call it that) and performance did not impress us. It felt childish and actually somewhat anti-dance, anti-performance, almost making fun of other disciplines.
It raises the question of whether self-indulgence can ever attain the level of art? Personally, I'm often disturbed by artists that have made a name for themselves and are well regarded attempting to make statements that seem too precocious and cute, as if whatever they do should be taken with seriousness and appreciated because of who they are.
Monk certainly seems to have her devotees if the shouting and applause from a segment of the audience last night is any indication, but it left us cold and I think we were the first ones out the door.
Sometimes you get a hit. Sometimes you get a miss. You just have to keep showing up and hope for the best.
posted by Paul Salinger at 4:46 PM
1 Comments:
Paul,
Thanks for the review. As in any discussion of artists works, there are often many points of view. In today's SF Chronicle there is a review of the Monk show by Joshua Kosman, who I usually read when checking out classical music reviews.
He seems to have a fairly different take, and for anyone interested, here is a link to the article on SF Gate.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/17/DDGT9H9E1L1.DTL
Keep the good writing coming.
Dave
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