In a recent post, I mentioned Fenner's take on Danto's criteria for whether or not something can be an art object. By his criteria, a thing must "be interpreted as art by the Artworld."
I have already established that pop music does belong in a category separate from other types of art and music. This is partly because it is so highly commodified, and partly because it is so functional: pop is in a very real sense a part of our everyday lives in a way that much Serious music and art is not. For an illustration of this, read the numerous interviews that make up My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life. One might argue that classical music and even impressionist art can function in the same way, but an important distinction is that the Pop World is meant to be incorporated into everyday life. Take the Walkman and the iPod as examples -- designed so as to make listening to music a seamless addition to day-to-day living.
Today, classical music is meant to be enjoyed/consumed/participated in by people who are presumed to have special training or "cultivated" taste. The same could be said about certain types of visual art and literature. Pop music is meant to be enjoyed/consumed/participated in by anyone in a given society. Who means these things? Good question. I don't really know.
If we are willing to agree that pop music is a system separate from the rest of what has traditionally been considered art -- though not separate from it, because pop music probably does comprise properties common to all art, which we don't have time to get into here -- we might be able to conceived of a Pop World analagous to Danto's Art World.
Danto sez:
"What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in the sense of is other than that of artistic identification)."
Danto is talking about Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. which are recognized as art even though they are in almost all ways identical to actual Brillo boxes you would have seen at the store in their heyday. But here is the big question for tenability of the theory of the Pop World: can we simply replace "art" with "pop music" here? Is it the theory that takes a (song, band, album, rock show) up into the world of pop music, and keeps it collapsing into the real object which it is?" I think we cannot.
Problem: Music is not object so much as event.
Counter-problem, of course: recorded music is an object. A possible solution to this is to assert that even recorded music is simply a captured or preserved performance, an event that can be re-experienced a great number of times. Writing once served this function in relationship to speech, but the analogy breaks down, because writing is now something separate from speech, whereas recorded music can never be recorded without first being played. Another possible solution: recording as performance. Whatever that means.
If music is an event, can we apply Danto's idea to events? That is, is there some theory that can change an event from an everyday occurrence into a work of art (or a work of Pop)? Perhaps it is a matter of consensus, which I think is really what Danto is getting at: we tend to agree that when Sting, Stewart Copeland, and Andy Summers get together and play their instruments on a stage, it is a Police concert and worthy of our interest as a Pop event -- but what if those same three men get together and eat lunch, or give a poetry reading, or even stage a gamelan performance during which they do not play anything resembling a Police song? None of those are Pop events, are they? Obviously the first two aren't, since one of the conditions of pop music is probably that there be music involved.
The gamelan scenario could only be pop if we agreed it were, and I can't really imagine this happening: a traditional gamelan performance is simply not a pop "thing," although gamelan sounds sampled by a rap producer could contribute to a pop event/object. We could keep going with this, but I want to get to my main point for today (below).
"The artworld stands to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands to the Earthly City. Certain objects, like certain individuals, enjoy a double citizenship, but there remains...a fundamental contrast between artworks and real objects."
fHere is where the Pop World and the Art World diverge, I think:
All Pop Music enjoys double citizenship in the real world and the art world. Or to put it another way: The Pop World is not seperate from the real world, even though pop music events/objects are separate from everyday events/objects. Rock music has a social function as well as an artistic one. We "use" it in a number of social ways -- mostly for questions of identity, community forming (inclusion and exclusion of people based on what bands you like), race and class (i.e. liking rap identfies you with the Black community, Country identifies you with poor/lower-middle class Whites, regardless of whether these kinds of people actually listen to this music), etc. -- AS WELL AS aesthetic ways (it makes us feel good, we enjoy it, we find it beautiful, we see it as representational of either spiritual or material realities).
So in the end, we find that crazy Meltzer was right: rock music is a "totality." Of some kind. It is an inextricable linking of "art" and "life." Although we in the pop world (fans, critics, artists) approach it from different perspectives, our roles frequently overlap and we all remain INVESTED in pop music because of its social and artistic functions.
Next up: Pop as Process vs. Product with Keith Sawyer.
Still to be addressed: the question of pop music as commodity.
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