Is Music an Art?

What is the nature of art? For me I have often believed it to be something someone does with paint without following numbered spaces on a canvas with paint. Is creativity then the essential core value of art?

In recent years books such as The Art of Reasoning’ and ‘The Art of Cooking’ have appeared to add to the number of activities classified by some as artistic activities. What then are the parameters that make one activity an art and another non-artful?

Long ago mankind beat out rhythms on logs to gain a drumming effect creating a sort of amusement later known as music. Was that an activity of art originating in the Congo? If art were an activity punishable by death, few ‘artists’ would claim to be doing art, unless government grants appeared for relief.

In the Middle Ages before a middle class arose artisans and later guilds formed to produce works of skilled trades. Centuries later a book ‘Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ was written to acknowledge mechanics as an artisan’s activity. If art is not a paint by the numbers activity however, such as playing an instrument to make noise following a sheet music pattern, can mechanics be what is meant in modern art’s meaning as art?

Art today would seem to be a creative activity. Jimmi Hendrix’s guitar playing was art because of the innovative methods, while musicians replaying Hendrix songs without much creativity are simply mechanics producing an effect.

In fiction writing it is perhaps more difficult to discriminate art from not-art than in fields such as music. There are political components to music today that many aren’t aware of incidentally…

A reaction of some leftists to education and established political power following their failures in the 1960s unto the present to win the intellectual battle for social philosophical correctness was to utilize the mechanics of music to oppose human ideas and political ideology from being expressed. The method was fundamental extinction of thoughtful lyrics. Music for-itself as noise would be trustworthy because of its absence of intelligent and possibly deceiving political propaganda. The writer John Saul’s pointed out in his 1995 book ‘The Unconscious Civilization’ that the main consequent of that approach politically is to exterminate dissenting political thought and surrender ideation to the corporatist establishment. That was exemplified by a recent critic of mine that suggested that this blog should be a haven for artists without politics and just shut up, listen to the music and sneak into the polling booth to rubber stamp one of the corporatist party candidates. Musicians as mechanics may slavishly coddle up to corporatists, and be rebellious in meaningless non-political areas. Ignorance is cheaper to get than is intellectual capital anyway.

President Bush Congress Raid and the Creeping Coup

One wonders if President Bush's Attorney General's raid on the U.S. House of Congress office of Representative Jefferson of Louisiana was more than a Don Quixote on a donkey tilt at the independence of congress or an actual leverage against congressional independence that supports a corporatist agenda effectively?Certainly Representative Jefferson might have accepted an F.B.I. bribe, yet the raid into his congressional office was ill-advised and par with the A.G.'s other nefarious ideas about the constitution and executive branch so as to allow torture unless 'major organ failure' results and so forth.' Separated shoulders and such wouldn't count obviously.

The Bush administration's tedious tenure still has two years or so to run, yet hopefully congress will still be independent then, and the President won't have possession of congressional files 'sealed' perhaps to gain leverage for support on his personal legislative agenda perhaps including illegal aliens having a fast track to citizenship after paying the executive branch a suitable penalty.On my tax bill this year on 6000 dollars in earnings, even with the earned income credit the I.R.S. declared that I owe 60 some dollars. It doesn't pay to file a tax return with some self-employment included while homeless obviously...at least the very rich got a tax break this year, so the very poor must help make up the federal budget gap.

With Treasury Sect. Snow's dismissal and Mr. Paulson of Goldman Sach's taking over the U.S. Treasury won't have far to go to find it's Wall-Street corporatist kickback watch adviser. I hope my 60 dollars gets redistributed quickly through Mr. Paulson's office to Halliburton and other Texas based corporations, or at least subsidies for offshore oil drilling to help Exxon's record profits, maybe my unrecovered separated shoulder doesn't need so many bottles of Advil as it seems.It isn't hard to imagine why people abroad including Afghanistan have a less than perfect liking for the corporatist technique of plundering the public treasury wherever it is.
President Bush's two term policies seem to be reaching toward a culmination of the establishment of a creeping coup of corporatism to end democracy effectively in the United States.

The Senate is rather wussy, so the House of Representatives is the target of Presidential intimidation with the muled F.B.A. being a non sequiter as regards democracy in the U.S.A. it was used by Attorney General Gonzalez to raid the House of Representatives to seize political files and computer hardware recently.Perhaps the President will direct General Gonzalez to raid the Supreme Court to seize case files for legislation it differs with in order that it may be 'sealed' yet paid per view by the Justice's in case they need a knock on the head to remind them of who's boss. Of course with just one more nominee on the Bush court the Executive's Corporatist agenda can be rubber stamped by his lackeys should a recalcitrant House differ with his decretals to them (including perhaps the end of term limits, or restriction to eligibility for President to a relative of the incumbent).

What is Corporatism? It is a political philosophy innovated by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Mussolini and other surpassing neo-liberalism or neo-conservativism, left or right. Public interest represented by government is nihilated over time to be replaced by non-representational private interest in corporate form. Wall-Street will lead the Treasury, Big Oil will lead government, the public will always have debt and its spending will be sluiced over too private corporate interests.Communism and Corporatism each are a form of authoritarianism.

Corporatism is the clear and present danger, and the Democratic Party's obsession with opposition to government building in Iraq is only a distraction from the need to protect representative democracy in the United States from corporatist coup.In the Corporatist system perhaps 30% of the elite or managerial class is non-creative, over-promoted thugs exploiting or destroying creative individuals and independent business under their stagnant, ossified Stalinist tyranny. They pacify Americans, flood in cheap labor from abroad, outsource work to China and India, plunder the public environment etc.John Raul's 'The Unconscious Civilization' is a good primer on the subject.