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View submission: John Cage 4’33
Cage was a very highly regarded composer and music theorist - one of the most influential of the 20th century. The piece would not have gotten the recognition it did had it not been written by someone of his stature.
It's also very interesting in historical context. It was written in 1952. Just a few years earlier, Samuel Beckett had written Waiting for Godot, which is often billed as a play where nothing happens (just two guys waiting for someone who never comes). About three decades earlier, Luigi Pirandello, another Nobel laureate, wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is a play about six characters who are lost, unable to do anything because they don't have an author - maybe sort of like humans suffering from anomie because they are untethered from God, social cohesion, etc. following the two terribly destructive world wars.
Likewise, there are plenty of interesting paintings that likewise reflect variations on these minimalist ideas. I don't think they're necessarily connected, at least not directly, but they are interesting to think about because they force us to think about ourselves and our relation to art - just as it was more than a simple joke when Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential artists of his era, drew a mustache on Mona Lisa and exhibited a ceramic toilet as a work of art.
Just to be clear, I don't think it's wrong to think about all of this as being pretentious, or mind-blowingly insightful, or whatever. What it shows to me is that art/music (etc.) is in the eyes of the beholder, and the works themselves are essentially metaphorical "mirrors" for us to reflect on.
There's nothing here!