analysis of the book of robotic mind
by mr strauss
column 4-
Success, Collaboration and Successful Collaboration
A name that will become very familiar is Komputadora. I don't mean familiar because of this column. I mean familiar in a larger sense. Komputadora is destined to be famous and, I suppose, wealthy as well.
Religetti offers a few thoughts on the dangers of success, that are mostly pretty common sense kind of ideas. I point to artists like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. Such men at one time made compelling art. They are now unable to do so. Why? Because success, in conjunction with an underdeveloped cognitive model about art, prohibits sustaining clear artistic vision.
Specifically, success misleads an artist into believing that he is the author of the truth he manifests in artform. This is of course asinine. Fully realized art is shaped by the dictates of immortal truth alone. The extent to which an artist authors the truths that his art manifests is directly proportional to the extent of that artist's failure.
So you can see the dangers of success. Success obsessively repeats that it is the artist who is genius. In reality, it is the art. The successful artist, however, if he lacks sufficient cognitive defenses, begins to believe success. And then he trys to repeat the efforts that earned him success in the first place. These "efforts" on his part doom him to failure, as they attempt to steer what must be permitted to take its own direction.
Regardless, Komputadora will be famous. And I think he will prove to be a mutation - a success-ergo-failure resistant strain of artist. He has ample abstract schema in place to fight the virulent lies of those who exalt the channeler for what he has channeled. He will be famous because the music he makes is stunning. To listen to it is to hear ten years into the future. The reason that this subject arises now is the immenent completion of PGL 002.
PGL 002 is the culmination of years of work. Having collected sufficient transcendent work, Komputadora put together his assemblege of audio. I entreat you to listen for a bit. Initially, it might mislead and suggest to a listener that this is art of conventional reach. Listen to a few songs a few times and know that this work is in its own class.
Simultaneously, it so happens that I reach completion on an assemledge of my own. mr strauss Learns to Rock is also the product of many years of development. It came out good, and I am pleased by it.
I am slightly behind K in the sense that he has already printed the cds with the colorful art on them and the packaging prepared as well. I, on the other hand, have just begun to print the audio cd's and have not yet printed any of the art on them yet.
Our parallel time tables bring up a question regarding collaboration. K and I often collaborate. On occasion, we will feel some addition to a given work of the other. Typically a small part - a small, complementary melody phrase or whatnot. Often these things go uncredited. And for good reason. Neither K nor I think that such small contributions at all change the basic authorship of the work.
Each work can have only one true author. That author may use bits by other artists and, provided those bits are true (of divine origin), then it is purely wise to implement them accordingly. But regardless, they are only raw artsuff really, things from the ether that the primary artist uses in manifesting his work.
At the same time, neither party is at all hesitant about giving credit, and the single author of the work is by far the more likely to point out the very useful contribution of the other. To tie this all in, notice that to accomplish artisticly lucrative collaboration and to do deal well with success in a borader sense both emerge from the same underlying perspective. Specifically, the reduction of the artist's own importance.
The thing to remember, admoinishes Religetti, is that
"the conceit of human authorship is a gift of Pantheonic grace and, as such, it must be believed whole heartedly and treated as an unqualified truth. Simultaneously, one must qualify the truth with the understanding that human authorship is a conceit gifted unto the people by right of Pantheonic grace."
