CTM.13 Theme

Under the conditions deployed by digital culture, globalization and postmodernism, that which has always been key aspirations and promise of art and pop culture now fully unfolds: unleashed subjectivity and an unharnessed imaginary meet the wide public acceptance of its diverse forms of expression. Those manifest not so much as essential originality but rather as the products of continuous processes of self-design based on the eclectic or syncretic appropriation and transformation of already existing materials.

Against this backdrop, today’s music presents itself as more diverse than ever before, and never before have the listeners’ ears been so receptive. This “anything goes” situation, barely constrained by canons, technological limitations or gatekeeper authorities, fosters what appears to be a paradisical flowering of fully realized creative potential: The Golden Age. Its hallmark is a kind of ubiquitous eclecticism or syncretism, that equally characterizes contemporary art music, pop-cultural niches and remnants of the mainstream, and brushes aside tired differentiation between high and low.

But when self-expression, once a heavily-contested strategy for emancipation, becomes the norm within digital capitalism’s gift economy, that which at first glance appears to be the manifestation of long-fought-for creative freedom quickly reveals its shadow side: the dire economic situation of many artists, the constraints imposed by major technology and communication providers’ own agendas, the breathless pressure of real-time media, arbitrariness, competition for the limelight, narcissism, redundancy, and the justifiable fear of going under in the current mass of fast-track productions, if ever one fails to constantly feed new output into the sheer endless channels through which music must make its mark today. are just some of the buzzwords up for discussion. Consequently, not all artists optimistically welcome the explosion of aesthetic diversity on the digital matrix, or the opportunities for recombination it affords them. By radically restricting themselves to a limited range of source material and strictly defined methods, or by stubbornly working through meticulous variations on long since established styles, such artists swim against the current, even when their work thereby turns out no less eclectic than anyone else’s.

Eclecticism has been a base credo for the CTM Festival since the get-go, and 2013 was no different. Under the consciously polemic and glistening, ambivalent theme The Golden Age, the festival investigated artistic approaches to the contemporary cornucopia and the yawning chasms it hides.