Trampling Art for Profits

PAGE THREE TRAMPLING ART FOR PROFITS For all its virtues, modern industrialism can ruin music under the spur of greed for profits. Witness, the ruin threatening the Art of Music. 300 musicians in Hollywood supply all the “music” offered in thousands of theatres. Can such a tiny reservoir contain culture artistic progress? The true function of the machine is to increase the value of the product fed into it—not to debase it. Therefore mechanical music, as a substitute for Living Music, is a spurious form of progress—Like a loom converting wheat into steady? The grind organ, however operated, will injure all our? For music is an artificial art, a form of social intercourse, and hence dependent upon human contact. Who profits by the elimination of genuine music from the theatre? Not the music-loving public! Not the musician! If you grasp the theatre program are entitled to read music—and did not care? taking the sound motion picture, for the price they pay—HELP SAVE THE ART FROM RUIN. Enlist with millions of others in the Music Defense League. When the public gives its verdict it will must be served! THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF MUSICIANS (Comprising 140,000 professional musicians in the United States and Canada) JOSEPH N. WEBER, President, 1440 Broadway, New York, N. Y.

A vintage newspaper advertisement shows cartoon musicians and performers being trampled by a mass of mechanical music and entertainment. The ad argues that recorded or mechanized music threatens living musicians and asks readers to join the Music Defense League. The joke is that this anti-mechanical-music rhetoric resembles modern anti-AI-art arguments, making the 1930s movement look like an earlier incarnation of the same cultural panic. EN: A vintage newspaper advertisement shows cartoon musicians and performers being trampled by a mass of mechanical music and entertainment. The ad argues that recorded or mechanized music threatens living musicians and asks readers to join the Music Defense League. The joke is that this anti-mechanical-music rhetoric resembles modern anti-AI-art arguments, making the 1930s movement look like an earlier incarnation of the same cultural panic.

• @gentoomemes / 3429 2023-03-27