Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen

by David Stubbs

Overview

Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news.

However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a "synaesthesia" between their two media.

This book examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781803417608
Publisher:	Hunt, John Publishing
Publication date:	08/01/2024
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.45(h) x 0.50(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Schism 3

Chapter 2 The Art of Noise, the Noise of Art 18

Chapter 3 Stockhausen, Fluxus and all that jazz 42

Chapter 4 Pop Art - From McCartney to Bailey 61

Chapter 5 Europe Endless, Post-Punk to the Nineties - Thus Far, No Further 74

Chapter 6 Art Will Eat Itself? 99

Conclusion 109