Sunday 18 May 2014

Art, performance, composition and work - thoughts after watching 'Tim's Vermeer'

A fascinating film. If X -> Z and Y -> Z is X <-> Y?

That's the question. If it is, then Vermeer used almost exactly the same optical equipment. I wasn't convinced before, but, now, it'd take some amazing evidence to convince me that Vermeer didn't.

I warmed to Tim over the film and, somehow, it is necessary (and fun) to watch the film to get the full picture, so to speak.

With Beethoven, you don't get the conductor and orchestra modestly saying that they'd just 'copied his composition' - rather you admire the performance.

Before today, I thought that performance art was a load of tosh. I've now seen Tim perform a work of visual art that really was a magnificent performance - almost like watching Beethoven's 5th being performed.

It reinforces, too, the point that the value of money is not that it brings leisure. For years there was the question about what people would do if there was no 'need to work' for money... but the question was mistaken. We have a need to work, that's far more fundamental than doing it for the money. Yes, of course, one needs money to live - but it was a persistent illusion that that was the reason for work.

The real motivation for work is delight in the work itself. It's been known a long time - karma yoga is the 'yoga of work'. It's proven by the massive amount of hard work that's produced wikipaedia - all of it done for no monetary reward. It's shown too by open source software being so much better than software that's written commercially.

Eliot could have been talking about the rediscovery of work:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

What will we do with all the 'leisure time' that computers, machines, robots and the like bring us? We'll work.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/