The creepy artistry sticks with you a while, but in terms of methodological novelty — and I use that term lightly — John Cage’s 4’33″ from 1952 predates it by 16 years.

I don’t like in general this kind of art, the art of nothing, for two reasons. One, because it’s sleazy to take credit for the audience’s own thoughts. Here we have a movie in which a great number of people are narcissistically rating the quality of their own thoughts and not the movie. And two, because leaving things up to the audience to such an extent is not a belief in their intelligence, but a patronizing insult. It says there is nothing the artist can give except a prompt to think, as if the audience is incapable of doing so of its own accord.

Are humans beyond such crassness? I submit that they are not, and to keep them pleased, expend we must.

Certainly that resource is not necessarily as transparent as money, but all the same. After all what is one born with? One is born with time, which is a limited resource. It doesn’t matter if one converts time into money at an exchange rate known as a salary or one converts time into effort at an exchange rate known as physical ability, so long as one is not superman, these exchange rates are finite, and thus the output is limited as well. One must wonder if it isn’t the finitude of the resource (time) that ultimately creates value and if it isn’t the transfer of value that pleases. If so, what can we conclude about even the most benign and thoughtful gestures? That they are merely purchases with a portion of one’s lifetime pool of resources?

There is some kind of corollary to this along the lines of time maximization as a life algorithm, but I don’t have time to think about it.