Musicologist Fazekas Gergely and his guests talk about music, collaborative games, the community of various art forms and the game rules of our artistic community and traditions.

It is a defining feature of the history of Western music, literature and art that it is always heading somewhere, or rather that it is always heading forward. Conservative historical narratives usually tended to focus on artists who have revolutionized the language of their respective art forms, as the avant-gardes of their time. By the end of the 20th century the idea (or the narrative) of continuous development seems to have lost its allure, as progression slowly eroded the wider audience as well. It has become a general phenomenon across art forms that contemporary works are only appealing to a small, connoisseurial target group, or to use an expression from Hermann Hesse’s 1946 Nobel Prize winning utopian novel: they became glass bead games. Naturally, this statement is only true if, based on the conventional narrative, we limit our understanding of the term ‘contemporary’ to revolutionaries.

The conversation between Krisztina Kovács (art historian, director of the Várfok Gallery), Tibor Bárány (literary critic) and Gergely Fazekas (music historian) will cover the following questions: what can we call ‘contemporary’? What does ‘new’ mean in the case of music (or novels, or paintings?). Is the history of art still heading somewhere, or has it already ended, just as so many people in the post-Hegalian age have predicted?