The Age of Tranfiguration

Quoting Trent Reznor, the significant artist in electronic sound scene, he noted the on-going diversion in the music business and the attitude which will be helpful for the emerging musicians and the radiohead-wannabees. In my opinion, the key is the structure is changing and this change also undermine the stratum where all the common sense has been granted in the music business. And this change is not limited to the degree of the music business. It also transfigures the basic concept of the music.

The reason why I note and quote what Mr. Reznor says is on the transfiguration of the concept, in a sense, the episteme of art in changing. The prevailing of the new media, especially the electronic media, has rapidly threatened the traditional concepts of art form as a commercial object. This transfer weakens the solidity of the retinal art, and imposed the fluidity and dynamism to the visibility in art form. And sometimes, it has been spotted just as chaos, meaninglessness and finally all the vogue. In a sense, the materiality in the retinal are has been evaporated by the advert of the intangibility of artistic material. Though it looks like that the music has almost nothing to do with the materiality in its inherent features, it is hard to deny that the well-decorated LPs, CDs and its materiality has been regarded as the tangible illusion of the artist, who is ranged from the Velvet Underground’s packages even to that of Britney Spears’. As a result, the electronic traits in pop culture, at first, dematerialize the cultural productions and, secondly, change the structure of the producing in pop culture scene itself.

However, whatever the situation, the question has been all the same. What should I do right now for myself? If you are creator, you don’t need to care about what is art. Instead, you’d better care about what can be called as art.