Founded in 1825, the National Academy of Design promotes art and architecture in America through exhibition and instruction. As the leading honorary society for visual artists and architects in the United States, we advocate for the arts as a tool for education, celebrate the role of artists and architects in public life, and serve as a catalyst for cultural conversations that propel society forward.
Our National Academician membership is a vibrant, intergenerational community of artists and architects from many backgrounds that honors the full diversity of practitioners in the United States. Across our varied creative practices, we are unified in our shared belief in the power of art and architecture. Through our individual work and collective initiatives, we support our communities, peers, and the next generation of creative thinkers. Each year, new National Academicians are inducted into our membership by current members. This honor cannot be applied for or solicited.
John Cage was a true renaissance polymath. He achieved notoriety and fame as an avant-garde composer, a theorist, an artist and printmaker, a writer, and a poet. He was also an expert on mushrooms and a brilliant chess player. Whew!!
@@markbrooks7157 Thanks for the info. Going off at a tangent but mentioning polymaths, the Polish-British mathematician and polymath Jacob Bronowski was a very good chess player.
The basic in Zen is irrational, non-materialistic, and a mind void of thought. When there were so many heavy stones laying around and so much of calculation and theories, you lost the essentiality of Zen contemplation. John Cage had gone to a divergent direction of emptying the mind.
I was a student a Stanley Lewis in the mid-1980s at the Kansas City Art Institute. His mantra has always been “paint what you see”. He was absolutely inspirational.
The passage of time is indicated horizontally in music, not vertically. You can hold your arm at any angle you want... but you indicate the passage of time in music by moving it side to side, just as Cage does in the video, not up and down. I love this video for a bunch of reasons, but the overwrought, ill-founded profundity of that moment always bugs me.
Funny enough that your comment not so old as video, because I was recently saw Xenakis graphic notations book and he too have that idea about verticaly representation of music! I thought about it before, and I have assumption that people from past generation, like Cage doesnt think of time in music horizontally because that just was not in common with tools that was used at that time, and tropes too. Like, if we think of birth of cinema, they are not use time so strict to story of a movie, just an example. Also, Mika Vainio, one of those person who too say about that music representation not horizontally (nor vertically if i remember correctly). Maybe we all percive sounds differently. sorry for typos and my English lvl, I'm not native speaker.
As a National Academy docent it is amazing to watch the video of how the works in the gallery were hung. It is also a poignant reminder of the many tours I have given there and the enormous pleasure I received from the times spent with the works in the collection. Thanks, Barry Friedfertig
