DCDanceBlog

This morning’s New York Times had an editorial about a composer, Steve Reich, who’s celebrating his 70th anniversary around now. Apparently he’s one of the seminal figures in modern music and they wrote very highly of him–of course I haven’t heard of him, but now I’m very curious. But what caught my eye was the phrase, among other praises of his skills, that he has an “unerring instinct for beauty everywhere in his work.” I thought that was pretty amazing and beautiful in itself. To me, art is still about beauty, always about beauty, even if it’s a different form of beauty, even if it’s showing the audience a type of beauty they never imagined.

This is basically a footnote in my unending rant against modern art that discards the idea of beauty being important, that focuses only on being as different as possible or “challenging” people’s idea of what art is. It’s funny, because audiences–average people–get it. They get when something is “challenging” but boring and ugly, for example, and to not take their sensibilities into account is, I think, pretty condescending. But it seems normal with modern art to discard the idea that the audience should somehow enjoy or be touched by the performance or presentation.