Democracy (“rule by the people”) and “high art” (art for refined audiences) make an unhappy fit. On a few rare but thrilling occasions, however, they happily come together like bees and honey.
This helps explain why some people (including me) flinched just a tiny bit after learning that the inauguration quartet that included the incomparable Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman had synched their performance. We thought we’d witnessed one of those special moments where hard-core mass democracy and supremely high art had momentarily become comrades. Instead, the high-art part turned out to be a tad fake. It wasn’t exactly full-blown fraud (like the kind that resulted in the pop band Milli Vanilli losing its 1989 Grammy), but by being synched the performance lost its aura of authenticity. The subtle, responsive swaying of the performers’ bodies—which at the time had struck eager television viewers like me as expressive—now seems slightly tacky. Any money a lot of people would have laughed if they’d known at the time that the performers were moving their bodies to the sound of their own pre-recorded music.
We’re told that given the cold weather on the day of the inauguration, had the quartet actually performed live, the instruments would have been at risk and the performers’ fingers too numb to make music. The sound would have been disastrous; it seems there really was no other choice. By going for effect, rather than means, the performers did what needed to be done to enhance the moment.
Certainly, the synching makes no difference to the Obama presidency. In the scheme of things it’s nothing but a tiny piece of inauguration trivia. Our disappointment in learning the performance was synched persists, however, and exposes our futile longing to live in a culture of authenticity even in the face of the realities of modernity.
Modernity invented both mechanical and digital reproducibility, and most of the time, we happily experience art via reproductions. Recorded music, posters of famous paintings, television and movies — all are appreciated without worrying for a second about whether or not we’re experiencing them as “authentic” or “original” works of art. Only a tiny fraction of the art we now experience (such as paintings or, as in this case, live classical quartets) even bothers to lay claim to authenticity — or its sister, originality — as critically important to its meaning. Why, then, should it matter one way or another that the inauguration quartet performance was synched?
The performance doesn’t amount to fraud on the scale of Milli Vanilli, but there’s no denying it wasn’t fully from the heart, either.
(Brainstorm illustration incorporating a photo from Photobucket.com)
