Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Art or Noise?

The video we watched about Brian Eno made me think about random chance being considered as art. Andy Warhol was considered to be the one that blurred the line between art and controversy. You may recognize some of his pieces such as the Campbell Soup Can (I'm not sure if that's actually the title or not). He took everyday objects, plastered them on a canvas and called it art. There is actually much debate over his works. How can a representation of a soup can be called art?
This leads to the point: Brian Eno uses random sounds and a random computer generator to develop what is called "ambience music". Can this really be called art? If so, then random number generators such as the lottery and casino machines fall into the same category. Listening to some of his compositions actually bothered me. It sounded like nothing more than noise--distracting noise, at that. Art is a work that is created with a purpose, not random things thrown together to make a "complete" piece. And with something all that random, how can you even define completeness?

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