You failed to realize that I am not a "would be magician"....
Failure... is not... in... my vocabulary....
Anyways If you like to blatantly lie to your audience (they aren't dumb enough to believe that magic does exist) then power to you...I for one do not present them a puzzle to solve but a flawless execution/performance of whatever trick I choose to present...You failed to realize that either way you go about it the effect will always be a puzzle to them regardless of presenting the effect as "magic" or not... but I rather not look like a fool and insult their intelligence by dropping ridiculous lines such as "abracadabra If I snap my fingers the cards will magically switch places trough the magical time device in the cardbox"....I would obviously not reveal the sleights and mechanics to them but I would drop all the time machine card bs and proceed with the reveal.
Your response is a false dichotomy. A performer's choices are not limited to providing a hackneyed presentation based on a stereotypical magician or providing a "flawless execution/performance" without patter. Let me explain....
Magic is performing an effect that the spectator believes is impossible. Does the "abracadabra" presentation add to the impossibility? No. But along the same lines, performing without patter or the typical say-do-see (say what you are doing, do it and ask the audience to see what happened) doesn't add to the impossibility either. The answer is to develop patter that adds to the impossibility.
the end result will be the same "oh me gawd!!!! the cards switched places. How did you dew that!"...The typical Old School magician will say "Magic"...I will respond by saying that it was me who did the work..."The effect was achieved through my prestigious Elite Prestidigitation"
I think Roberto Giobbi said it best:
Prestidigitation seems to imply, from its etymology, that it is necessary to have nimble fingers in order to produce the illusions of magic, which is by no means strictly true....The word prestidigitation, therefore only imperfectly describes the art which it denotes.
Genii, May 2010, p. 30.
By claiming the feats you accomplish are done through your prestidigitation you have actually removed the impossibility and made it a demonstration of skill. You might as well be a juggler, and, to paraphrase Robert-Houdin, a magician isn't a juggler.
Although avoiding insulting your audiences intelligence by claiming that you have pixie fairy "magical powers" is good to me.....It all comes down to.... I rather take credit than the deck.
The options aren't the props taking the credit or the magician taking the credit. The options are presenting what you are doing as "skill" or presenting it as something that cannot be explained. I can take credit for making a signed card disappear from a deck and reappear in my wallet without resorting to explaining, "I was able to do that because I'm really good and fast with cards." Further, the wands and pixie dust are just examples of bad presentation style.
I'm not a huge fan of the Old school patter btw...In fact I am against it...I need a good word to describe how much I oppose the Old school magician scripting-fictional-cheesy stories they come up with....
Try to overcome your closed-mindedness regarding patter. Just because a lot of magicians use fictional cheesy stories as patter, that doesn't mean that all patter has to be a fictional cheesy story. Coming up with strong patter that enhances an effect isn't easy, but that shouldn't cause you to give up on developing strong patter for your effects.
I just stated that no educated individual or anyone below the age of 12 will believe that you really do have magical powers...Like I said...If you like to lie to your audience and insult their intelligence then power to you....I however refuse to Insult my audience like that...If they want to believe that what they saw was magic then whatever...You failed to realize that I never exclusively said that I say "this isn't magic" before performing an effect.... reading comprehension fail? I said that I will not claim that what I am doing is an act of magic during performance..I will not use any dumb magical lines during my performance...that is all...no semantics...If they do ask me how I did It I will respond to them by telling them that I did the effect through my Elite Prestidigitation yes....But the person asking how I did something does not believe in magic anyways...
I suspect most people believe in magic. Not in the sense of fairy dust and magic wands, but in the sense of a performer being able to do what appears to be impossible. They understand that it is a combination of skill and knowledge and gimmicks. However, if a magician does their job, the audience will experience astonishment - which I define as the conflict between reality (the mind saying I know there is a way to do it) and impossibility (the senses saying that I have seen something that shouldn't happen) being won out by impossibility. It is easy to shoot for tricking your audiences based on your prestidigitation skills. It is more difficult, but also more rewarding, to astonish your audiences by performing magic.
I do like Roberto Giobbi's definition of magic:
The purpose of magic is to take man's world of dreams, desires, and fantasies as the subject and show how it can be lived by a super-hero, a God on earth, who is the magician, the maker of wonders. The beauty and wisdom harbored by the mysterious , and the feeling of astonishment and wonder created by the magician's performance, liberates the spectator from the constraints of his limited intellect and leads him... over the rainbow, through Alice's mirror into Wonderland, where everything is possible.
Genii, May 2010, p. 32.