A Sufficiently Advanced Racket: Performance on the Margins of Art and Commerce

Abstract

Abstract: In 2014, the indie house band Vulfpeck released the album Sleepify on the digital music-streaming service Spotify. The album consists of ten tracks, the first titled “z,” the second “zz,” the third “zzz,” and so on. Each track is just over thirty seconds long, and each is composed of absolute digital silence. Not to be confused with John Cage’s only allegedly “silent” composition 4′33″ (1952), as Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton is quick to clarify, Sleepify is actually, definitively silent: “It’s not a recording of a still environment; it’s an actual digital file full of zeroes.” The catch: via each listen the album accrued on Spotify, the band was that much closer to funding its 2014 tour—which, should all go according to plan, Vulfpeck’s fans would be able to attend for free. Putting Sleepify in conversation with producer Mike Batt’s alleged plagiarism of 4′33″ and performance artist Marina Abramović’s 512 Hours of doing nothing, I interrogate the aesthetic and economic dynamics of the performer-audience relationship in work in which it is only through the audience’s willingness to do something that the artist’s goal toward doing nothing might be realized.

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