I don’t mean to get all pointy headed (well actually I do, so the brain dead can safely turn their attention elsewhere), but I’ve just read this article by the art critic Robert Hughes,

http://www.guardian.co.uk...69,00.html

and was struck by some similarities to things Prince has said about the musical culture of the times. Specifically the idea that there is no longer "an envelope to push." Hughes is making exactly the same point:

“An institution like the Royal Academy, precisely because it is not commercial, can be a powerful counterweight to the degrading market hysteria we have seen too much of in recent years. I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between, and what else is news? I know, as most of us do in our hearts, that the term "avant-garde" has lost every last vestige of its meaning in a culture where anything and everything goes. Art does not evolve from lower states to higher. The scientific metaphors, like "research" and "experiment", that were so popular half a century ago, do not apply to art. And when everything is included in the game, there is no game to be ahead of. A string of brush marks on a lace collar in a Velásquez can be as radical as the shark that an Australian caught for a couple of Englishmen some years ago and is now murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames. More radical, actually. “

We’ve reached a point, he seems to be saying, where the only way forward is backwards. What Prince says about song craft is exactly parallelled by what Hughes says about the ability to draw. Is Prince onto something? Is this a kind of new radical conservatism, or does “cutting edge” still mean something?

great visionaries think alike

all in the eye of the beholder.