Posted by pseudolus 4 days ago
It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.
Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)
In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to commit to the project you won't see through, it has a significance to those people making the commitment. What becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also hard to ask "why are we doing this?"
In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in providing a property that they will own, but I could just as well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively changes the living and working future of the parents.
The cool thing about freedom is that we don't have to be rational monks that are slave to economic utilitarism.
Alastair Reynolds' book Chasm City touches on a bunch of this, in particular the class warfare angle of some wealthy travelers getting to enjoy the journey in peaceful cryosleep while the poor ones pay for their passage in servitude.
This isn't really so different from being born on Earth, except that we take being born on Earth for granted, and the population is really really big.
Opting into an interstellar voyage is a significant reduction in opportunity for almost anyone.
And yes, the same could be said for a European colonist crossing the Atlantic to the Americas in the 16th century, and many of them did face starvation, exposure, etc, but it's different when you're largely committing yourself and your immediate family to those hardships, under the belief that the timeframe for "a better life" is the next generation. Committing intermediate generations is a different beast.
Every decision is potentially committing descendants to the consequences of that choice (and to wit: life aboard a generation ship hardly need be a miserable or undesirable one, at the size of say, a large town and surrounding hinterland you have as much or more opportunity as anyone else at most times in history - I think generation ships force us to confront uncomfortable questions about what is the meaning of life on Earth which we try to sweep aside by deciding they're an impossible moral burden).
You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.
You spent generations expecting to be bold explorers pushing the frontier and getting to claim nice territory, and you show up to find you’re in second place.
(as described in Vogt's "Far_Centaurus" short story.
A theme that turns up in Starfield as well...
We have plenty of examples where this has already happened. Traditions that were maintained at significant cost in the face of difficulties or opposition. Caretakers of something ancient who struggle to find an heir. We tend to view them positively.
> Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property.
I suspect this has been misreported. Japanese mortgage terms are pretty normal and property prices are much lower than in the west (even the bubble only really affected central Tokyo). There's a practice of an elderly parent being able to get a mortgage that's then "inherited" by a child, in cases where the parent is retired or close to retirement, but it's pretty much a face-saving (and tax-avoidance) measure.
If you take too long building a cathedral the quarry might exhaust itself in the meantime. So even if you keep to the design it might not look right.
> The outside facing consists, due to the interrupted building process, of three different kinds of white marble.
At least that's the case for the co-cathedral in Zamora, Michoacán which had its construction interrupted for almost a century due to the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War and its subsequent expropriation by the government. In this context, the mismatching facade remains as a testament of the building's history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocesan_Sanctuary_of_Our_Lady...
Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the tickets for.
Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems like a potential scam in that sense.
Again, if they sell something they're calling a ticket to the final part of the performance, then they have a financial duty to keep the project going (or refund the ticket) and it's not "their business" to end the project early like the person I replied to was claiming. At the very best, they could invest the money and use only the interest to support ongoing operations, but they need to keep the original value available to refund or else they need to fulfill what the ticket's for-- if they do neither of those things, they ripped people off, period.
If they're just funding the project's continuation, it's on them for pulling the marketing stunt (and/or false advertising) of calling it a ticket for this event in 600 years instead of just taking donations, selling present-day tickets and/or merch, etc. Fine print saying "actually, this ticket isn't a real ticket, it's just for fun" doesn't make them look better to me, so I don't see how that'd be a defense in your mind.
I think you're framing this in the wrong way. Anyone buying a ticket knows there is no guarantee that this finale will occur, or that even if it does, that whatever entity in is in charge of it by then will honor the tickets. They treat this as a donation to something they care about, and the ticket is a cute gift of appreciation. And on top of that, the descendants of the ticket-purchasers may have lost the tickets generations ago, not even know about them, or not even care.
Suggesting that people are getting "screwed over" is unnecessarily dramatic.
I agree 100%, which is part of what makes it such an easy scam to pull off!
You're attempting to sell this thing as a donation with a fake toy Monopoly-money not-actually-expected-to-be-redeemed ticket thrown in. The top commenter of this thread shouldn't have tried to include the ticket as a serious value-add if that's what it is. The comment specifically said "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it [using the ticket]," not "so you can support the project out of the kindness of your own heart without any guarantee your descendants will get to see the finale."
Sure, you can create scenarios were that fails. You can do that for anything. The power lies in saying "we are willing to remove these paths from consideration because we as a people are committed to not letting them occur".
It's a model that fails if you apply first-order utilitarian calculus. But the intangible value of the hope and commitment in it likely overshadows any immediate gain. This isn't about how to maximize utilization or optionality. It's a bold statement about who we are, and a lodestar to aspire to. (Which is, ultimately, the job art does)
They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
That you are primarily driven by music and aesthetics, and others are primarily driven by science and technological creation, and most of us are driven by both in varying degrees - that is what makes us human.
I am a strong tech person. Always have been.
That said, early in my life I took a chance on music and really enjoyed the performing arts. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I ended up doing Music education for my peers.
A beloved teacher had a health issue that left them unable to teach and the substitute did not have the same manner and appreciation for the music and after a few conflicts, they called me out and I (foolishly) accepted!
Now I just had to back it up with actions.
Short story, "my" class was a success. Students reached their goals, we placed well in competition and that teacher and I developed a great friendship.
You are dead on with your comment. And having had the chance to take music education, then turn right around and deliver it seriously was at once crazy and ultra enlightening!
I had the realization my chest thumping got me placed into a position where I had an obligation to educate my peers and rid them of that blind spot you wrote of the same as was done for me.
And that was the H in "hard." Running the class, prepping pieces for performance, debugging the choir all were what I thought was hard.
Nope.
Getting them to internalize the humanity of it, language of emotion and all that, is hard. Respect for the art, whatever it may be, is hard. Cultivating the culture of learning, shared vulnerability (in the case of group performing arts) and the intensely personal nature of it all is hard.
I grew half a decade doing that as a high schooler, who had no clue at all what they said yes to...
In the end, a walk through the humanities is both empowering and enlightening on a level many technical people fail to appreciate.
No fault of theirs. They just did not get what I and many others did or gave as the case may be.
I can put a notch sharper point on all this for passersby (assuming you and I talking is preaching to the choir):
The ones who do not take the trip through the humanities are often told what to do by the ones who did.
Thanks for doing the hard work you do. It is often underappreciated.
Still on the nose.
It’s one of those things that really lets you know how much you don’t know. Then when you comment about such things on the internet you might be open to learning more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are doing.
The problems appear when you start assigning a monetary value to everything you do.
I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music.
Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music.
I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line.
Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that.
Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".
I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit.
I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation.
Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
Sometimes for me, I need to take myself out of trying to "solve" the art piece and be intentional about viewing it with a different, less literal mindset. It's still me doing the thinking, but it kind of short-circuits my normal interaction with the world.
Or maybe that's just a bunch of blowhard bullshit, I don't know, but it is what I do.
While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way.
There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.
I don't. Equating questioning a piece with willful ignorance and a safe-to-hate caricature all smell of bile to me.
"nerds too nerd to art" (more specifically in this case "hustler too hustle for art") is just a grade school putdown we use as artists to perpetuate the inaccessibility of art conversations and keep our cool mystique up.
It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.
It’s like saying a dodecahedron isn’t that impressive when viewed sitting on a 2D plane because it’s just a triangke and there are more interesting 2D shapes. True, but so reductive it’s tautological.
I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all.
This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.
Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".
“What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.
We do still have a set of requirements for what is considered art, and we still have a set of hyper conservative gatekeepers that are resistant to change and will blame today’s boogeyman for everything that they feel is wrong with society
Where exactly have you got this narrative from? Or even better: please explain how Marxism relates to contemporary art, I can accept just a general line of ideals connecting to each other.
I tried to have some leveled way to see your opinions on my other comments but this went a bridge too far, you seem to be repeating a collage of unrelated stuff, as I said in another comment: it's so bad that it isn't even wrong.
Marxism is really a cancer that destroys everything it touches. Its final aim was always to destroy everything that is beautiful, elevated or pure about mankind, and we, as a society, have been sponsoring it with our taxpayer money that pays for the self anointed gatekeepers of intellectualism that populate a big part of our Academia - that is to say, all Academia that doesn't get judged by the outcomes of their ideas when applied in practice.
Again, I think you're inverting causality by blaming Marxism for post-modernism, when they are instead related results of the same overall trend, that was simply catalyzed by WWI (there's definitely a read on e.g. the 1917 Russian Revolution that it happens at least wildly differently without Tsarist Russia entering the war).
There is simply no way that a conservative worldview brings any art form forward, not even from classically-inspired backgrounds, by pure definition it attempts to keep the status quo, and all they achieve is a soulless repetition of what art was from the period they considered as "golden".
Not much dissimilar to what you are trying to do, to be honest.
You are just part - probably only a satellite - of the self pleasing circle of modern art critics that ultimately live on the backs of the working man.
People that write stuff like this about a urinal on a wall:
"Arensberg had referred to a 'lovely form' and it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal's gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha or, perhaps more to the point, one of Brâncuși's polished erotic forms."
Did the Renaissance painters who used single-point-perspective do so in service of seizing the means of production? Obviously not. But they did do so knowing full well that it was a break from the previous art styles, and that such a break was a good thing. Likewise for the rise of the novel, the fall of meter in poetry, digital and electronic art, etc etc
At the end of the day, one of the better (although still incomplete) differentiators between art and simply craft is the deliberate pursuit of novelty of expression. That is, an artist is always trying to say something new, or say something in a new way. You can be exceptionally good at producing the exact same painting, but that doesn't make you an artist, simply a craftsman (and there is nothing wrong with being a craftsman).
But I don't think many serious critiques of "this is not art" claims invoke Marxism. The Marxist perspective generalises the idea that art is incredibly difficult to define, but doesn't originate it.
The Long Now Foundation is attempting to build a clock to last 10,000 years.
Construction began close to a decade ago, and there is no estimated completion date. Construction of the clock may well last 10,000 years.
Coincidentally the clock will ring with a cycle of chimes that repeats every 10,000 years
The pyramids are only half that old, and they've accumulated a fair bit of damage despite being solid stone.
I wish there was more stuff like this, both in my feed and in the world.
Just reading that line alone brightened up my morning. You can admire something and still find it a bit silly.
In a sense he is exploiting a lack of rules that would prevent a piece from starting with this long of a rest.
In other words, he is hacking the process.
a: vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
b: the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity
You can certainly play a recording of the piece at whatever speed you desire, and decide if it has rhythm, melody, harmony, unity, and continuity. Extremely slowing the piece down does not remove those things.
…and yet that answer entirely misses the point that the question is about the choice of definition.
You could argue that the first bar is actually shorter than all the following ones and only starts on the first note, but… no one thinks like that that I ever heard of
That question itself is built on a radical assumption. Example:
Just skimming, it looks like 38 out of 48 of the fugues from Bach's WTC Books 1 & 2 begin with rests followed by several beats worth of melodies in the first measure[1]. If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
You can use accent patterns on a modern piano to play any of these fugues using either of these methods, and it will sound silly to non-silly keyboard players.
What's more, non-silly keyboard players do feel the pulse for the first downbeat of these pieces when they perform. Most of them will even inhale before the downbeat, as if they are somehow singing the melody through their fingers.
Finally, lots of music begins with rests: not just conservative cases like Bach, but progressive cases like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth, and of course the radical cases like Cage's.
This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
If Cage's music did nothing but compel these questions it would be worth its weight in pine nuts.
Edit:
1: Bach does this because nearly all the fugues have three or more independent melodies singing at the same time. If they are all singing on every downbeat it can quickly sound really clunky and predictable.
Why is this radical at all? This is exactly how most humans perceive it: as a lead-in to the second (I might even argue first) measure. It's very strange to me to say that most humans are supposed to understand the piece to have started before any sound is played. In fact that's quite preposterous: play a song that starts with a rest to 1000 people and ask them to gesture as soon as the song starts, and every single one of them will gesture on the first note played. How are they supposed to perceive the song to have started any earlier than that? A song "starting with rests" is written that way to make it understandable to the performer who is reading the notation. It's a purely notational thing. The notation is not the song, the sound is the song.
> 1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why? Why can't you just say the piece starts partway through a bar, and we notate that with a rest for convenience? Just as when a piece ends partway through a bar we would generally accept that it ends when the last note ends (and while we might notate that as being a full bar in the case of a long held note, we don't always play it that way), not after some trailing rests, and we wouldn't consider this as being some kind of radical accented thing.
Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?
This idea is applicable to so much
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#/media/F...
Haters gonna hate, but there's not much more to his work than using extreme pauses and tempos as art. Maybe it's meta art.
He gives an up tick indicating the beginning of the music, then the downbeat of the start of the first measure.
No sound is heard.
The conductor continues to mark time. The silence is deep...profound.
The conductor continues to mark the time of the passing measures.
The audience listens.
At some point, positive sound breaks the silence - suddenly, loudly destroying the stillness! Or possibly very nearly silently - at the uncertain threshold of perception, the audible music begins...
right, so it begins when the music starts playing?
You go to your hi-fi setup, a veritable temple of sound reproduction.
You peruse your library and select an album. Or perhaps you have a new one that you have carefully carried home from the store. Whichever.
You lift up the cover of your turntable.
Carefully, you extract the vinyl disc from its cardboard and paper sleeves. Taking care not to touch it by its surface, you place it on the turntable. Perhaps you clean its surface with a special lint-catcher designed for this.
You lift up the needle by its little handle. Delicately, you place it on the disc, in the space between the very edge and the visible band of the first track.
There is an anticipatory crackle. A fuzzy pop. The sounds of the needle skidding across the smooth surface of the disc, and dropping into the groove.
A pause.
And then the music begins.
Perhaps the music begins loud and fast. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's a few words from the bandleader, welcoming you to their new album. Perhaps it's a collage of natural sounds that gradually gives way to music.
When, precisely, did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
----
It is 2025.
You take out your phone. You turn off its notifications.
You find your headphones and put them on. Perhaps they give off a beep complaining of being out of power, and you have to put them on the charger, and dig up your backup pair, possibly along with an adaptor to plug them into the headphone jack that no longer exists on your new phone.
You open up Spotify, Youtube, whatever you use to stream music. You type in the name of what you want to listen to.
You hit 'play'.
Your phone begins downloading music off the internet. Perhaps first there's an ad. Perhaps several ads. Perhaps not. Perhaps it takes a while to buffer. It's an indeterminate thing.
And then the music begins. As before, perhaps it hits the ground running immediately; perhaps there's some collection of anticipatory sounds, some pause, before the music really gets into gear. Perhaps it's interrupted five seconds in by your discovery that this is actually just the first five seconds of the track followed by an ad for Bitcoin, or the discovery that this is a track with a name similar to what you asked to be played, and you get to go back a few steps. Perhaps you actually get what you wanted.
At what point did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
You're essentially describing the time the audience sits waiting for the orchestra to walk onto the stage as being "part of the experience of going to the orchestra." Which is fine, but it's not considered part of the song (unless the composer's quirky and writes "walk onto the stage" at the beginning of the music sheets, which is basically what this guy did with the 17-month rest).
Moreover, nobody was actually sitting in that cathedral for 17 months listening to the first rest. If a 17-month rest is played in the middle of a forest and nobody hears it, was it really a 17-month rest? Who experienced that "experience?"
Not that I'd expect a conductor to be needed for a soloist performance, but it makes the whole "when the conductor raises his hands" point a little off-topic.
Man, that was wild.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_bXRMTJog
Fair warning, it sounds very jarring and disjointed.
Just like life.
