Nietzsche and Runaway Audio Consumption

The only thing lost is fetish value! How cool is that?

Great post indeed!

«The only thing lost is fetish value»

Benjamin+Baudrillard....

If we observe that mechanical reproduction can ADD all interpretations in classical music and all "takes" of a piece in jazz and gave them all in one fell swoop to a listener, for example i collect interpretations of the "well tempered klavier" we can correct Benjamin lost of the aura concept and Baudrillard predatory simulacrum and replace/correct them with the revelation that the gesture of time, his timing, could add something which lack from eternity : the fleeting essential moment....THE ACT DONE IN TIME at the right time..All interpretations and " takes" ADD a perspective totally new on a work of music that exist at the same time in perspectival time and in eternity ....

Here we have the secret of martial art, of musical playing, of listening and speaking and the key to redemption...Even the secret of small room acoustic linked to the timing of reverberations waves and the timing of the first wavefronts for each ears GESTURE....

At the root of martial art: Heinrich Kleist "the puppets theater " masterpiece about the gesture in time , and the deep meditation about REALITY in Dostoievsky short novel : the dream of a ridiculous man...

Think about that these two short complementary stories contains all the history of the world in condensed and abbreviated way...

Read the 2 and compared them...

In a word, the possibility to listen in one day to many interpretations of a work of music takes us from time to eternity and from eternity to time back again...Erasing the illusion of a past "golden age" and erasing the illusion of the ALWAYS future progress to come...The work of art is no more an image of paradise but a part of it through our own listening gesture...

And so we can value experience of original and reproduction each in it's own way. A printed reproduction may even provide greater cultivation of spirit vs original painting. Because the print has relatively little material value, nearly all value contained or perceived in what the painting says to us. The original may divert our attention to material value, artist's technical skill, etc.

This conversation brings to mind Robert Pirsig's, 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.' When quality only perceived as judgment on linear scale we lose sight of process and true values, we only see the ends of things.  A more holistic view understands and values all the parts that make up the whole. Complex systems are made more easily understood and each part becomes more valued.

Audio systems and motorcycles, and all complex systems for that matter can be contemplated in like manner. Rather than jump to conclusions based on simplistic notions of what is good and bad, we can contemplate the qualities of complex systems. Its in these qualities we find the human spirit. Capacitors, resistors, pistons, connecting rods, all the parts contained within audio equipment, motorcycles, and all complex systems, invented and manufactured by humans, all endowed with spirit of those makers.

And so, are audiophiles engaged in spiritual work when building audio systems? Perhaps those with above mindfulness are. On the other hand, maybe all of this  delusional rationalization, the whole endeavor may be in fact nothing other than a zero sum game, the wins are temporary at best, all become a succession of loses. The win only comes when no further upgrades desired or purchased, and this has to be permanent position. One may be contemplating or desiring audio system changes right up to death, in this case futile endeavor.

To me, this idea of how our spirit is tied in w/ our individual level of fulfillment as we pursue this hobby of ours, is how well content we are, at peace you might say, with whatever equipment we currently posses, or use to enjoy it.

Of course, how well each of our systems perform is not only very individualized, it's also very subjective. There's a certain level of smarts here, right? Prob why this hobby attracts so many intellectuals. I don't consider myself intellectual but I am eccentric as hell, and I kind of like that about myself. 

Love the part about poverty of spirit. That's exactly the way that I see it. At the end of the day if I'm not content with whatever I have, it may very well possess me. And that is a form of poverty, for sure. I'm sure we all know those who never seem to have enough or always want something they don't have. It's like a bottomless pit that can never be filled. 

Thank you for provoking such an interesting conversation, @hilde45 

Definitely also helps me understand better why I find listening spiritually fulfilling and uplifting. 

Wonderful food for thought.

My go-to aphorism for making sense of many interactions:

“When the pickpocket saw Jesus, all he saw was his pockets.”

nonoise: in China, and also in Japan, there is a serious market for the kind of hand-painted artistic copies you describe, to the point that particular "forgers" who are exceptionally skilled can sell "their" work for huge sums. The quotation marks here are necessary, as you surely see. Is a copy of a famous painting a "forgery" if it is not intended to deceive, but rather, is meant almost as a kind of tribute to the artist who created the "original" that it is based on? In many Asian countries, artistic values do not derive from "originality" at all, but rather, from successfully imitating some ideal. I spent some time years ago on a house boat on Dal Lake in Srinigar. All the house boats are elaborately painted, and all in much the same way. The artists don't try to be "unique," but rather, to most successfully express a Universal. As a philosopher, this makes me think of Plato's theory of Forms, according to which all sense objects are just copies of ideal archetypes. 

sns: I really like what you say about how even a poor copy can perhaps provide "greater cultivation of spirit" than the original painting because we are not distracted by "material value" or even "the artist's technical skill." That's a really interesting suggestion. Perhaps it has something to do with the decline in straightforward representation in painting, an historical fact often said to be related to the technological development of photography, which rendered realistic painting superfluous. But your insight is much more interesting than this commonplace "fact." Perhaps the "expression" managed in a genuine artwork has very little to do with "accuracy" (representational accuracy in painting, or "high fidelity" sound quality in music reproduction). There are some recordings of very poor sound quality that nevertheless are tremendously moving. My favorite performance of Brahms' First Symphony, for instance, is an old monaural recording by Furtwängler; every other interpretation of that work disappoints me.

And if this may be so, it brings us full circle. What is valuable in art, finally, is not something quantifiable: not "measurements" in audio equipment, surely, but also not exactly "SQ" either. Rather, aesthetic value comes from the expression (call it "spirit," since we've been using this word freely in this conversation) of the artist.