Boredom, the real secret behind innovation: Mark Applebaum at TEDxStanford 

Why thank RU-vid?

you understood nothing

Listen again. He is not talking about your concept of beauty, but stretching your shallow understanding of creative sound.

Applebaum IS the perfect example of post-truth, alternative facts, masked behind wanna-be-hip postmodern phony. If he is ever to make 0.000001% of the effect a composer such as Beethoven had in humankind, then he could begin talking. What a stupid idiot, and you're even worse for defending him. I have no compassion nor respect for you people.

Thanks for the attempt at psychoanalyze me. I appreciate that. Yes, I do get angry at people like Applebaum who think it's cool to mock Beethoven, just because doing it raises eyebrows. Once I read an article by Jeremy Denk entitled "Why I hate Goldberg Variations" and my reaction was, immediately, the same as my reaction to this TedTalk we're arguing about here. The similarity with MA's talk was the "shock" component. How can you call Beethoven boring; how can you say you -*hate* Goldberg Variations? The difference lies in who's really saying that. Denk, like MA, was reaching for the shock element to gather the attention of his audience/readers. Pehaps a bit of egotistic self-promotion also motivated that. The difference is, however, that Denk really doesn't hate Goldberg Variations. He was trying to focus on the simplicity of the piece... in reality, showing that a paramount work of art can be built on very simple blocks... such a simple chord progression it could be part of any pop song. Denk is a superb pianist and an artist who honed his talent with lots of practice and dedication to become who he is. That gives him much more ground and credibility to speak critically about music. Go check MA's work and his music. We live a time plagued by faux artists, many of whom have enough brains, persuasive power to attain respectable positions, especially in academic institutions. And thus they conquer effective venues to preach their faux tenets. I would love to give MA a simple quiz on Beethoven's works, or give him a score to analyze, and I'd be curious to see the results of that. Perhaps he'd need to go back to school to discover that Beethoven had already elevated boredom to the highest form of creative practice. Three centuries ago.