Advancing the Art of Magic?

[Donald C.]

We always here this, How can we Advance the Art of Magic? Or something along those lines, but what does this mean to you?
Does it mean
- Adding a new genre to magic
- thinking of a totally new concept
So what does it mean to you? I do not have a direct answer for this, so I can not really give my opinion.

 

[2 Legit 2 Quit]

I think changing the way magicians are seen can advance the art. If we can escape that cheesy, stereotypical, rabbit-out-of-the-hat stereotype, magic would be much different and more appreciated.

 

[Sidekick]

To me advancing the art of magic, is advancing us as performers.
Advancing yourself is hard and requires you to look at magic not as a hobby but as an Olympic athlete my look at 100m race.
Do you think Usain Bolt, just said what the heck I will just break the world record?
No, he trained, he practiced and he adjusted his life to suit his racing.

That is what you need to do. I never look at magic as just a past time hobby and I try to commit myself as much as I can to studying magic and becoming the best I can not to please or not to "advance" magic but to please myself and advance myself.

Once we all have advanced ourselves, then can magic move forward.

 

[descartes]

We always here this, How can we Advance the Art of Magic? Or something along those lines, but what does this mean to you?
Does it mean
- Adding a new genre to magic
- thinking of a totally new concept
So what does it mean to you? I do not have a direct answer for this, so I can not really give my opinion.

I'm not sure if there is a simple answer to a question of this magnitude. I'll give it a shot, but these are all just my opinions.

Not all magicians are focused on advancing the art of magic, and they don't need to be. Imagine if you went around asking musicians what they have done to advance their art. How many of them invent new genres? How many of them come up with new concepts? My guess would be less than 5%, and this is not a problem for music as a whole (although people might say some genres of music are dying out, but that's a different story).

Ultimately, I think that whether you are an amateur or a professional, you should try and advance the perception of magic itself among laypeople. How do you do this? By performing good magic. By performing magic which entertains, mystifies and engages the audience. Anything you contribute to the art beyond this is an added bonus.

 

[AsherF]

plain and simple... Advancing the art, it first needs to become an art, and it's still not that in the eyes of the audience. We're advanced enough in it ourselves that there is no need to continue progressing forward within the art. The audience needs to see it as an art first and that's what matters.

 

[i.am.infamous]

@AsherF - This is the way Art is described (from Wiki) :

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings.

And this is the way Magic is described via Wiki :

Magic is a performing art that entertains an audience by creating illusions of seemingly impossible or supernatural feats, using purely natural means. These feats are called magic tricks, effects or illusions.

In my opinion, YES; MAGIC IS AN ART. Do we entertain our audience with how Magic? YES. In a sense, anything that entertains one can be labeled as an art.

 

[AsherF]

I agree that magic is an art, never denied that. That's what brought me to it. But in terms of advancing the art. The next step is convincing the audience that it's an art, and they have yet to be convinced.

 

[i.am.infamous]

@AsherF - I see your point, greatly and I agree. But I was also stated this for everyone who DOESN'T believe Magic is an art. And I've seen A LOT of threads here and everywhere else where members believe that Magic ISN'T an art, when IT CLEARLY IS.

 

[AsherF]

Well, we can't walk up to a spectator with a deck of cards and a sandwich sign with the wiki definition of art displayed on both sides. Magic needs to reach their emotions, which is what the definition says. It's what music does, it's what film does, it's what writing does. Magic has been an ego game for years. "look what i can do." It has nothing in the world to do with patter. Magic isn't art until you make it an art. You can pick up a brush, but sometimes what ends up on the canvas is just paint. Just because you're a 14 year old, pick up a deck of cards, you aren't officially an artist. You need to turn those 52 pieces of paper into something that means something to your audience. How do you do this? Have a soul. Have emotion. Tell a story. Which, believe it or not, you can do without saying a single word. Music does it. Paintings do it. I remember an old video from this forum. I believe it was called Heavy Smoking. I showed a laymen friend of mine two videos, one, was card trick by the bucks, another was that Heavy Smoking video. To the first, they were impressed. but sought out the method. to quote their words from the second "That is art." They felt a story behind it. They felt emotion. Same can be said of flourishing. You can be the greatest cardist in the world. Perform the most flawless routine in front of your camera at home. audience will probably feel nothing, maybe impressed. But take Andrei Jikh's 'In the Cards'... That is art and what he did weren't the most difficult moves. It's not about what you do, it's about how you do it, how you present it, that makes it art.

 

[i.am.infamous]

@AsherF - Couldn't have said it better myself. Very true. And by the way, by "EVERYONE", I meant Magicians.

 

[AsherF]

like I said, it isn't an art until you make it an art.

 

[CallingEagle]

If you bake one cake it doesn't make you a baker...if you paint one painting it doesn't make you a painter, and doing one trick doesn't make you a magician.
If you look at all three they are forms of art especially if you've seen a lot of the crazy cakes out there(some almost look fake they're soo crazy), and we know painting is an art...obviously but it takes years to baking you're average birthday cake to a wedding masterpiece or from a picture to a portait. Same with magic anyone can do a trick but you have to work up to the illusions. A DL is just a trick but incorperate it into an ambixious card routine and you have an illusion.

I think maybe to improve the art is to make sure we can keep our spectators attention by drawing them into what you are about to do and not just say "hey you wanna see a trick". If they feel they've been let in on a secret few know they'll likely stick around for whatever you have to show them.

 

[Mr.MadMan]

I once discussed this topic.
Im going to paste my idea of it from there to here but do check out the awesome replys that have much knowledge and thoughts in them: http://forums.theory11.com/showthread.php?t=24741 .

My Though Cycle:

I have been on these forums for well over 2 years, from the beginning actually and from time to time good posts pop up that make you actually rethink everything i thought was ideal.

The art, is this even art?
There was a thread a while ago(klick)called is Magic Art, the majority thought that it was, although a big number of people disagreed.

Why?

Because we are not striving to a goal, proven by Mr. Steerpike in his wonderful thread which he just released. We are not striving towards anything, to tell you the truth we have become lazy bastards, moving our butts only when someone smacks us with a load of cash. The real spark of magic has somewhat faded away, the real sincere love for it and all that it stands for.

I mean i see guys who have been at this for 40 years and they have more love and spark to it than i do. And i love this art, more than anything in the world, currently(this implies that i don't have a girlfriend ). But why have we lost the spark?

Because we do too much, i for one: Mentalism, Spiritualism, Hypnotism, Programming, Web Design and Development, Graphic Design, School, Film class, Friends: The list goes on. Think about what was going on 40 years ago, nobody asked what sports you are in or whats you favorite hobby, they knew you either played Football or Baseball and that was it nothing more. Now we have millions of different hobbies and such and we want to try everything and even if we find the ones we like and want to do we still move on to other stuff and try to see what happens. We have a lot of knowledge in different hobbies but they are only on the tip of the iceberg, nothing more. Just basics.

I saw a film today and i quote, "Staring at the eyes of a computer screen will starve children from their inspiration, imagination and cleverness...". I find this fascinating since it is true, for me at least.

How does this have to do with advancing the art?

Well generally when two people loose their love for one another they get divorced and thats what happens to a lot of us. I mean yes people say that kids don't have their priorities straight and what not and they leave things too quickly but this is not a late thing, it has been going on for centuries, people just tend to overlook that. But if we don't have love and the will to do magic how can we even do it properly. I mean yes i can learn to be good at it but if i loose the spark and go into a routine game and thats nothing else but work.

I used to live magic, live for the name of it and nothing else. It was my life and still is but what changed was my ways of doing it. I used to go out all the time and do street, i had umph, i loved it. The spark was there but i went too far too quick, i wanted to become big too fast and the spark did not ignite.

I loved how my friend said to me when i hooked up with my ex, "A big flame at the starts means that it will burn out fast". And it did...a fast fire burns out quicker than a slow phased fire. We need to learn that and act fast, we all want to be superstars too fast and get recognition from others so that we can be good in the eyes of fellow magicians when actually we have to look at the audience and see what they think, what is their view on it and take that as solid ground.

I for one am going to pursue my dream of becoming a professional Mentalist, having my own show in Vegas and also in my home country.

We cannot advance the art, if we are not good enough to fit the shoes of the old guys.


Mikk.