I believe I've posted this Garrison Keillor excerpt previously but I laughed when I just re-read it so here it is again. It speaks so well to the distinction between art as an intellectual tidbit and art as a meaningful, pre-cognitive connection between artist and audience:<\/p>\n
A couple weeks ago I watched a tenor in a gondolier's outfit stride out on a stage and sing to an immense outdoor crowd "O Sole Mio" and "Torna a Sorrento" and "Finiculi-Finicula," three old cheeseballs that no serious singer does nowadays, and when he hit the big money note at the end of "O Sole Mio," that crowd jumped up as if bitten by badgers and yelled and whooped and whistled. I loved that. Serious artists seek to create challenging work that leaves the audience stunned, thoughtful, even angry, but what we the audience want is the pure joy of a man aiming at a very high note and hitting it squarely and us jumping up and yelling. A simple reflex, same as when the opposition hits into a double play in the ninth inning with one out and the winning run on third.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I believe I've posted this Garrison Keillor excerpt previously but I laughed when I just re-read it so here it is again. It speaks so well to the distinction between art as an intellectual tidbit and art as a meaningful, pre-cognitive connection between artist and audience: A couple weeks ago I watched a tenor in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}