[Joeboy]

I'm afraid this is very much an "a man in a pub told me" anecdote, but a while ago I chatted with somebody who apparently interviewed people who attended the original Rhythm 0. She said that initially people were reluctant to behave in the violent ways expected, and Abromović's assistants were telling people they were spoiling the art by being too timid. None of the online write-ups mention this so idk, but it would make a lot of sense. The piece would've been a damp squib if (a few of) the audience hadn't behaved as they did.

Either way, perhaps it makes sense to think of the audience reaction as artistic collaboration, rather than innate human visciousness.

[rendall]

This is really an important piece of information to understand the original art! The interpretation is vastly different because of this!

It reminds me of a story I heard about John Cage's Music of Changes, which was famously composed randomly. John Cage purportedly threw coins and consulted the I Ching to determine each subsequent note. However, during a memorial at John Cage's death, David Tudor told a story about how he saw John Cage just writing down the notes and not throwing coins. When he asked for an explanation, John Cage said the he did not have to throw coins "because my mind is random."

[red_admiral]

> because my mind is random

I can't find the source, but I think it's Scott Aaronson who told a story of a device with two buttons, which students were invited to press as rendomly as possible, but training a simple Markov model allowed them to predict what button an individual would press next most of the time. Student after student tried to trick the predictor, and failed. Then this one guy comes along and mashes the buttons and the prediction accuracy never goes above 50%. When they asked how he was doing it, he said he "just used my free will".

[jancsika]

> When he asked for an explanation, John Cage said the he did not have to throw coins "because my mind is random."

Was Cage claiming some kind of spiritual musical connection from choosing pitches based on the I Ching? If not, then it was just a practical compositional consideration. He didn't need cryptographically secure sequences, and-- at least in terms of music cognition-- at worst he ended up repeating consecutive pitches fewer times than he should have. (And if he started with I Ching-derived patterns he may have noticed the repetitions and successfully emulated them with his mind!)

After all, his general need for random processes was to avoid accidentally falling back into patterns from the common practice period of tonal music (esp. patterns from the Romantic era). In other words, his mind was basically good enough for the avant garde. :)

[rendall]

For me, the interpretation of the art changes significantly. That it was composed randomly was the entire point of the music. If the anecdote was true, that was just normal composing that every composer has done since there was such a profession.

[WhitneyLand]

Yes! If true it reminds me of Hasan Minjaj.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/hasan-minhajs-fab...

[acjohnson55]

Ugh, that's disappointing to read. Certainly, I don't assume the stories told in standup are precisely true. But it's poor form to make up a story about being a victim of bigotry.

I do question if it's unfair that a non-minority comic can make up stories about whatever and I don't necessarily feel that's a problem. But I think it's the fact that people will assume you've been victimized as a thing to know about you outside of your performance that feels wrong.

[cameldrv]

Similar story, I used to know an artist who knew her casually. He said that she was intensely aware of the commercial aspect of her work and is basically the art equivalent of a shock jock. She gets a lot of attention and makes a lot of money from doing the most outrageous things she can think of.

[Semiapies]

I wouldn't feel bad about anecdote in this case. All the online descriptions of the performance, including this Wikipedia article, rely solely on the artist's narrative of the events.