Word: caged
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sight. "It's gonna go," he mutters. His eyes are on the ground, dejected, but his hair dances in the fierce wind, and shadows flicker across his face. Suddenly he spies the cat -- a black beauty named, of all things, Santa Ana Winds -- and stuffs her in a small cage. The animal is frightened, moaning. Miller is not much better. He begins to cry. "I don't know what to do now," he says to a reporter. "Can you give me a ride back...
Music: Was John Cage a genius or a crackpot...
Finally there is the not at all negligible matter of how the music sounds. A common, philistine criticism of avant-garde art used to be that small children banging on pots and pans or flinging paint at a canvas could have produced exactly the same effect. In Cage's case, at least, this is very probably true (and he probably would have delighted in it). A concert of Cage's noises is, by and large, as much of a room emptier as it was when the work was new; Cage may be the first important artist whose work one wants...
Popular acceptance, or the lack thereof, does not prove or disprove an artist's worth. Surely, though, the irony has not escaped his vocal band of adherents that for all its devotion to "chance," to musique trouve, to the music of the streets and the spheres, Cage's compositions sound as tightly / scripted and totalitarian as anything by Pierre Boulez or Luigi Nono. It is chance music in which nothing is left to chance -- as Cage eventually realized. In Peter Greenaway's 1983 television documentary on him, Cage complains that he has had trouble getting performers to take him seriously...
...Cage's failure was occasioned by his own audacity and the intractability of human nature. Confucius, who analyzed and annotated the I Ching more than two millenniums ago, summed it up in the book's appendix: "Change has an absolute limit." Cage's fate was that, by chance, he found...