tocharian wrote:What do you mean “postmodernism has had its moment”? Do you mean that artists are swearing off digital manipulation and creating everything from scratch? Postmodern strategies are here to stay, although there will always be cranky modernists who insist on whatever their idea of authenticity is.
I’m not quite sure what curator art is, but what Kavinsky, SebastiAn, Justice, and Mr. Oizo do goes beyond curation. Maybe you could say that their approach is akin to what Cat Power did with “Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, i.e. detected some small element in a song, extracted it, and recombined it with other elements to make something entirely different in mood and texture. But you couldn’t even call their music curation based on the samples they use. A lot of the Ed Banger artists’ raw materials is cheese (Goblin’s “Tenebre”) or outright garbage (Simian’s “We Are Your Friends”), from which they make something astonishing—which in my opinion makes what they do more like Jean Tinguely and his sculptures constructed out of industrial and consumer detritus.
I think postmodernism is at the heart of this thread, so i'll say my two cents and then get out, because when it comes to electronic music i'm completely out of my depth and completely uninterested too (it's also 3 am and i fear attracting ire).
No, postmodernism isn't going anywhere. No, I'm not a modernist who will say that it has had its day. However, as a discerning cultural critic I feel compelled to write that postmodernism, as a philosophy, can and does set itself up to be dismissed. Yes, it sets everything else up to be dismissed as well, but in the end it is the product philosophy for a population obsessed with the idea that variety is the spice of life.
In the end I think it comes down to the fact that theoretically you CAN do anything, but it doesn't mean it will have any substance. Burial's music, like Kavinsky, etc..., might be considered art, but "art" - just like film and music - is something that is currently defined by consumerism and has been reduced to
KITSCH. You can still call it art, or film, or music, but with this added amount of democratically-innduced postmodernism/consumerism, kitsch is going to be tagged on to it.
What I dislike about Burial, as well as his peers, as well as the cut-and-paste "beep beep" thing he's into, is the kitch consumerism that is inherent in the music. This democratic consumerism is found in rock too, that can't be denied, but it appeals on a more specific level. It's as if these electronic dj's NEEDED to appeal to everyone - to appeal to a wider market - in order to make music, so what did they do? Reduced everything to the most easy to swallow shit you could possibly get.
So this music can theoretically be taken seriously - so what? When other people dismiss it, because they don't like kitschy democratic stuff, they have a valid argument.
