Art music & entertaining music

August 15, 2016 Soumya Radhakrishnan

Being a blogger and a netizen, I have observed on several web forums/communities that music has been categorized often as an ‘entertainment’ in the drop-down lists. While there are many that consider music as an entertainment, there are also, others who consider music as an art.

Entertaining music need not be artistic enough and art music need not be entertaining enough. Do listen to the differences in compositions and playing styles in classical music and popular film/pop music and you will understand what I am talking about.

It can be inferred from our cultural mythology and literature that this difference in the entertainment and art components of music could be a result of our inability to deal with boredom.

Here's a possible reason that explains many great musicians are unpopular due to their inability or a lack of interest to amuse and entertain the masses with their music.

How remarkable it is that those who do not bore themselves generally bore others; those, however, who bore themselves entertain others. Generally, those who do not bore themselves are busy in the world in one way or another, but for that very reason they are, of all people, the most boring of all, the most unbearable… The other class of human beings, the superior ones, are those who bore themselves… They generally amuse others — at times in a certain external way the masses, in a deeper sense their co-initiates. The more thoroughly they bore themselves, the more potent the medium of diversion they offer others, also when the boredom reaches its maximum, since they either die of boredom (the passive category) or shoot themselves out of curiosity (the active category).

Soren Kierkegaard

Real art and fame are on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

They got us hooked on data. Advertisers want more data. Direct marketers want more data. Who saw it? Who clicked? What percentage? What's trending? What's yielding? But there's one group that doesn't need more data... Anyone who's making a long-term commitment. Anyone who seeks to make art, to make a difference, to challenge the status quo. Because when you're chasing that sort of change, data is the cudgel your enemies will use to push you to conform. Data paves the road to the bottom. It is the lazy way to figure out what to do next. It's obsessed with the short-term. Data gets us the Kardashians. The culture of compromise is often accepted as the price of mass. But in fact, this is the crowded road to popular acceptance, and it works far less often than the compromisers believe it will.

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