Art

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker....

UPDATE: This was very much a stream of consciousness blog post, where I wrote down my thoughts as they occurred to me. Among other things, this meant that it lacked a good summary of what it is actually supposed to be about. The basic idea was/is to take Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation in business and apply it to music and (by extension) to other arts, with a goal of sketching out a “unified field theory” that (with suitable elaboration) could potentially explain how music evolves not only from an aesthetic perspective but also in terms of the sociology and economics of the communities of composers, performers, critics, educators, audiences, etc....

Apparently I have a thing for the British artist Jack Strange. After my post about Strange’s g and a follow-up, I’m back with more amateur (or should that be amateurish?) analysis of Strange’s work, this time his Spinning Beach Ball of Death. As with my first post on g, this is a cold reading without the benefit of seeing any artist’s statements or critics’ analyses. Spinning Beach Ball of Death is one of those works that most decidedly depends on one’s knowledge of “external facts” to elicit a proper appreciation....

I recently posted some thoughts on the work g by the British artist Jack Strange. It was pretty much of a cold reading, without the benefit of having done any research on Strange or his work. Since then I’ve done some googling and discovered some useful commentary. Not to telegraph the punchline, but no one echoed my thoughts about g being (at least in part) a symbolic reenactment of the literal act of falling—which means that either I had a unique and valuable critical insight or I just pulled something out of my rear end....

Continuing my amateur ruminations on contemporary art: One of the things that’s fun about art is going on a journey from “OK . . .” to “aha!” from seeing something and not really understanding or even registering it, to both grasping an essential point about the work (even if it’s essential only for you) and seeing and appreciating the further associations and cross-connections it raises. It’s especially fun if you can get to that point on your own, without having to read the wall text or a critic’s article....