Taylor Swift and the Duct Taped Banana

–Taylor Swift is better than that music… and let me tell you: Taylor Swift is very bad!

And that’s how it ended my introduction of John Cage to my 13yo kid.

We started the conversation talking about modern art and it raised up the work “Comedian” AKA the Duct Taped Banana from Maurizio Cattelan. He was questioning why a banana stuck on a wall can worth millions of dollars,
Well to their defense, it was sold for $120,000 and it was a series of 3 so it’s not worth millions of dollars, but that only make worst his questioning about the high prices of some contemporary art and the absurdity of those works and then he get an idea: what about contemporary music? Is there such thing as contemporary music that can be compared to this works?

That’s when I told him about John Cage, well it’s not exactly contemporary anymore (he died in 1992, more than 30 years ago) but we can say it’s post-war music and that’s close enough.

So, I started trying to describe the music sheet of 4’ 33” his most famous work and one that can be compared with Cattelan’s Comedian. I told him that the music sheet could be by itself a work of art that can be framed, and he couldn’t believe it.

– How is it possible, there’s nothing on it, just silence!

– Exactly, just silence, that’s what we need and that’s what John Cage is proposing.

And then I tried to describe a pianist in a concert hall wearing a tuxedo siting at the piano passing the music sheet, sheet by sheet doing nothing else but focused on the music and rhythm and trying to follow the compass.

– That can’t be true you’re crazy.

Luckily for me, now everything is on YouTube and showed him the performance. Then I proceeded to show him more works of him: Double Music for percussion quartet composed by John Cage and Lou Harrison and No. 1, Solo for Prepared Piano by John Cage.

He didn’t like it and thought that everything was absurd, why do you want to put objects on the strings of a piano to make noises instead of “real music”?

That’s when I remembered what I had said about art: Art should be a shock, something to shaking you up, wake you up. Sometimes it has to be painful or absurd or taking you out of context, out of place. That’s the case of John Cage or Maurizio Cattelan.

But there’s something else, the prize, I really don’t understand why money is an important player in contemporary art, or at least for a big chunk of people, even my kid is talking about Contemporary Art as an absurdity of millions of dollars instead of the real meaning of art. Can we change this discourse?