John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change

Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time.

It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.

Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)

It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.

It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course.

They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.

Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.

We're also the only species that can use abstraction to assign meaning to and relations between symbols in any way we choose. The humanities and the sciences are both extremely important to what makes us human, and saying that only one is 'what makes us us' will alienate those who are different from you.

That you are primarily driven by music and aesthetics, and others are primarily driven by science and technological creation, and most of us are driven by both in varying degrees - that is what makes us human.