Upon hearing an Eric Clapton guitar solo

[fpb]

At times like this, I really do feel sorry for atheists. One has to be grateful for artistry so miraculous, but they have nobody to be grateful to. (And don't give me any crap about "the human spirit" - that is what we owe the Murdoch press and robotic dance noise to.)

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Why is it an error to give an artist the gratitude for the effect his art has had on us?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Because he has done nothing to deserve the genius, and the work he has put in to develop it is not different from the work that ten thousand others do every day for much less impressive rewards. Apart that I argued somewhere else that half of the reality of genius lies in contemporary social realities - ah, but this is one of those quotations from lofty ancient things that bother you so much - the distribution of genius is so arbitrary that to be grateful to a man for being a genius is just as stupid as to be grateful to a man for being blond. And worse still. Just as genius is not in the control of any human being, so it is not a MORAL advantage. There are criminal geniuses - Benvenuto Cellini bragged long and loud about his detestable life - and stupid geniuses. Generation of journalists have gone away disappointed from interviewing geniuses and finding them, on almost every argument, not any better informed, wiser, or more insightful, than any other human being of moderate intelligence or diligence. Indeed, sometimes bad information and bad judgment extends to their own field: one just has to see what Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Brahms and Hugo Wolff said about the music of their time, including each other's. In this day and age, we are prone - and rightly - to criticize celebrity culture, to bad-mouth the journalistic promotion of a small number of figures of varying notoriety and the assumption that their opinions and misdemeanours will be of interest to every reader. But the admiration of the genius as a person, rather than of his/her work, is more or less in the same league.

[cosmolinguist]

But when I, or presumably you, listen to Eric Clapton's guitar solos, you are not grateful for the abstract quality you call "genius" but instead the pleasure of the emotional reactions elicited in us by his playing. Music, like genius, is not about morals. It appeals to us in a way that can cross boundaries of class, age, upbringing, language, religion, or pretty much anything we are clever enough to split ourselves into groups for. All what you say here is very interesting but like a politician you address the points you want to talk about rather than the ones you were asked about.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is the second insult thrown at me in your last two comments, let alone that you are the one who consistently refuses to answer the points raised. You are dancing in the last chance saloon.