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8

TIME AS MONEY

 

Since so much of the discussion regarding cultural control thus far has centered around music, we must now confront a timely question:

What is music?

Music is discussed in terms of notes and tones, songs and chords. But the most essential ingredient to music is actually time.

While what is called music can include any array of sounds and nonsounds, all of it, every genre, including John Cage's famous silent composition, relies on time to convey its purpose.

Time, meanwhile, is held in such high regard as to be considered equal to or interchangeable with money, promulgated by the phrase "time is money," which in turn is the central pursuit of the culture. Time is therefore a commodity, something that must be controlled by financiers and speculators, like oil and real estate. A central basis for the economy and the underlying obsession of the modern world, industrial innovation is focused mostly on "saving time" or contracting the moments it takes to normally perform a task.

Time = money is an economic equation derived from the scholarship that if life is the pursuit of money (life = money) and time is the primary aspect of life (life = time), then necessarily time = money. In an inevitable adjunct, the essential time component of music makes it the preeminent modern art form. Because music requires a commitment of time from the listener, it is now considered precious in a way other art forms are not. As opposed to painting and other static forms, one cannot experience music at one's convenience, diverting one's attention when one wishes. One must listen to music in its time-specific entirety. While, according to statistics, an American tourist can race through the Louvre Museum in nine minutes and forty-six seconds, absorbing thousands of nuanced artworks with each moment, it takes forty-one minutes and fifty-seven seconds to listen to the Enantiodromia album by Azita in its entirety.

This amount of time can't be bisected or sped up in any way while still maintaining the unmarred integrity of the piece. Similarly, if one hasn't spent the whole 2:23 it takes to hear Wilson Pickett's "Land of a Thousand Dances," one has not really listened to, or "heard," that particular song.

Meanwhile, a single glance at the Mona Lisa constitutes it having been "seen" by the viewer. The viewer commands the time in this scenario, while with music it's the opposite: the medium controls or determines the experience, whether live or canned.

Thereby, borne of the spectator's ability to deflect his own eyes from Mona Lisa's famous gaze comes the exalted privilege of amplified, modulated sound (along with the similarly time-based/blessed medium of film) in modernity.

Because time and money are now interchangeable, the worth or "seriousness" of music is often determined by the length of the piece. In pop music, for example, the album-oriented era, which commenced with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was considered a dialectic progression from the singles era, and heralded the first serious critical consideration of the form. The pop single had always been dismissed as "bubblegum," with more verbose and long-winded jazz contemporaries receiving critical props.

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When Tommy appeared two years after Sgt. Pepper's, it was considered a revelation, the fruition of The Beatles' aborted excursion into opera, the medium long considered the "total work of art." An artist's great statement was always their double LP, as with the so-called White Album, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, and the Stones' Exile on Main Street. Similarly, the opera that trumped all others in terms of critical respect was Wagner's marathon Ring cycle, which lasted five days.

The time = worth equation is present in other forms too. In film, the Antonioni or Kurosawa films which exceed three hours are the most "serious" ones, with David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia being the studio film par excellence. Warhol poked fun at this conceit with Empire and Sleep, his unendingly boring static art-house events.

Therefore, the era's obsession with time, whereby each new invention radically contracts the time it once took to perform a menial or supposedly inconvenient duty, such as baking bread or washing clothes, has elected music to its modern, cosmic relevance.

It is a status that can seem bewildering. The holy mantle of music is strange when it seems to have lost its venerable function as Dionysian trance-inducing rite or crucible for community. While ancient cultures used their music for festive mania and for violent incitement in times of war, the modern equivalent can seem abstract and meaningless. Spectators and enthusiasts typically stare courteously while the performers self-consciously execute their work. A concert usually ends without the catharsis or rapture that was once expected to accompany music, with its arcane metaphysical component.

In a world, though, where time is an absolute obsession, where time and money are interchangeable commodities, the listener is so harried, too guilty to meditate or ruminate, that what he or she desires from the music is for it to stave off the mortality which the advertising industry has pronounced is present in every single second. If music can no longer be relied on to induce a whirling-dervish frenzy, it can provide a blanket of cover from the responsibilities of the minute and hour, usually so wrought with fear of death and sexual anxiety. Music has become a sanctuary essentially, a church where one finds respite from time.

Music's function is now in fact merely one of expanding time for the listener against its unceasing contraction at the hands of the industrial sector with all of its "time-saving" inventions and products. Where humanity has lost the ability to reflect and meditate due to the loss of time (in the form of modern convenience), music replenishes (in the form of abstract, "psychedelicized" expanse and mindless repetition which mimics preindustrial work modes).

The time when one was once alone and purposefully contemplative, the time which has been lost to the jet plane, the hair dryer, the clothes washer, and the microwave, is recouped in the form of music, which relinquishes one from modern neuroses: hence its election in the modern era to the place of prominence in the artistic life of the culture.

This freedom-from-time component is used by industry as well—in the department store, for example, where ubiquitous radio lulls one from the anxiety which the products one stares at initially induced. Music as tool for shopping is one of those particularly sinister reflexive ironies.

The industrial age's "time is money" equation, while elevating aural expression, simultaneously destroyed static art as a viable expression in the culture. Due to painting and sculpture's immediate consumptibility, along with their inverted man-hour–to–time viewed relationship (an oil painting or sculpture is a laborious and painstaking process), static art could no longer command its historical dominance in the age of machines.

Static, two-dimensional art hovered in the background while one hurried to pursue one's wretched tasks in the time-obsessed culture and economy, and didn't challenge time as the medium of music did. Music demands the precious commodity and wrestles with it for primacy, earning the respect of the market if not winning outright. Static art, meanwhile, rolls passively into a corner to be consumed at leisure, inciting only contemptuous second-tier status and paternal, high-handed patronage.

Art scholars, jealous of this new aural hierarchy, insist that a time component is still inherent in painting. What of the implied narrative of the static artwork? And what of its place in history and in the artist's development? And the thousands upon thousands of hours of painstaking scholarship based on the famous canvases? Are they not time-consuming and time-intensive? And, furthermore, don't they command more weight than the relatively infantile proliferated music medium?

These hours, while certainly impressive, are moments culled by enthusiasts, and are not primary to the form. They therefore cannot be counted as integral aspects of the art. They are also nothing compared to the millions of hours which music has muscled from oblivion through the medium of amplified radio. An empire colonized out of otherwise inhabited hours.

Duchamp provided a way out for static art by producing his "ready-mades," artworks that were essentially one-liners, and took as long to prepare as they did to conceive. By electing any piece of detritus as "art," he trumped other time merchants and opened a new world of possibility for his peers. This reconciled somewhat the inefficient money/time relationship that had been suddenly fatal to the craftsmen's genres (oil, stonecutting, etc.), but it couldn't deter altogether the painter's inevitable fall from grace.

Modern art is typically still beholden to Duchamp's model. Warhol's industrially inspired art was crafted in his "Factory," where mass-produced silk screens were signed by an army of underpaid and exploited assistants.

Minimalist work (Kelly, Newman, Rauschenberg) and that of a modern-art star such as Christo follow a similar trajectory. The piece is only executed as an afterthought. The idea is everything and it's just as effective to relay the idea verbally.

This sort of art, with its transposition through rumor, needn't be seen at all and is therefore the most valuable, as it circumvents the time it would take to travel and look at entirely. In the twenty-first century, though, it's generally accepted that time-based video art and performance are the future and that still pictures will soon be altogether extinct.