Dr. Boli agrees with John Cage in his assessment, and now he will tell you why.
If you asked a dozen art critics to name the dominant trend in art since the beginning of the twentieth century, you would get at least thirteen different answers. That is because at least one passer-by would also render an opinion. But few of them, or none, would correctly identify the dominant trend. From his uniquely long perspective, Dr. Boli is able to see that trend clearly. The dominant trend in art since 1901 has been the gradual but ultimately complete irrelevance of the work of art itself.
Before the twentieth century, what made a work art was the artist’s application of effort to it. It might be bad art or good art, but the artist had tried to make a work that embodied his ideal of what such a work should be. A portrait painter attempted to create an image that was not just a recognizable picture of a person, but also expressed the subject’s character. A composer made use of harmony, melody, polyphony, rhythm, and all the other tools of the trade to evoke a mood, or to create an impression of action, or even just to make a pleasing intellectual exercise. Artists fought vicious battles over what considerations were important in creating a work in their genres, but they were fighting on a common battlefield: namely, the idea that the work itself was the ultimate result and the focus of their efforts.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, some artists began to challenge that idea. Marcel Duchamp, with his “readymades,” threw it out the window. More and more artists in the twentieth century took up the hobby of challenging the idea of art. Andy Warhol, formerly a top commercial artist in New York, painted exact replicas of commercial products to question the distinction between “fine art” and “commercial art.” At about the same time John Cage was working on 4′33″, Robert Rauschenberg used rollers to cover canvases with white house paint. (Cage was quite taken with these works, as you can imagine.)
All these things can be found in any art history. But what few seem to notice is that because of this trend, which has been completely victorious, the work is no longer where artists put their efforts, and therefore is no longer the primary artistic product. Instead, the primary artistic product is now the explanation of why this work is art.
This is why 4′33″ is the most important work John Cage ever produced, and probably the most important one he was capable of producing. In 4′33″, the work is literally nothing. It does not exist. The art lies entirely in Cage’s explanation of why you should consider this music. Even Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings were vestigially works of art: there was a material object made of wood and canvas and paint, and you could look at it. But you cannot hear 4′33″. You can only listen to something else while it is going on. Precisely, says Cage: you are discovering that there is always sound, always music, and there will be until the moment you die. The work does not exist, but the explanation of the work does.
Today orthodox contemporary art is based entirely on the assumption that the explanation of why this work is art, rather than the work itself, is what makes a work art. But 4′33″ refined that assumption to its purest elemental form, and no work can ever go beyond it. It is the εἶδος of art in the current sense, and all other works by living artists are merely imperfect representations or instances of 4′33″.