Yogurt Tops

So, a week or two ago, I got in a… well, let’s call it a ‘friendly debate’, with two of my oldest and dearest friends, Nikki and Lyndsi. I can’t remember what on earth drove our conversation to this topic, but I started talking about an exhibit that I saw at the MoMA in New York last January. That exhibit was four yogurt tops stuck to four walls.

No, really. And they basically all looked like this:

Times four, of course.

So, I was talking about how stupid it was, and how that shouldn’t be in a museum of art. They came to the yogurt tops defense, and did so vigorously. I was surprised because any other time I had brought this up to anyone, albeit that happened very few times, everyone readily agreed that it was stupid.

They were talking about how I didn’t know what the artist’s intent was, so I couldn’t judge it as stupid. I told them that I admitted that I was being cynical. I didn’t imagine someone thinking that they were doing something great, or even someone really enjoying what they were doing themselves and actually getting something out of it. I imagined someone doing this to do it and laughing at the outcome and the people that were going to see it. They said I didn’t know and thus couldn’t prove it, and I said the same thing of their opinion, and we all chased out tails in giant circles.

I thought about it for a few days, and I came to a conclusion. Everyone most likely has a ‘yogurt top’. The ‘yogurt top’ being something that you will defend no matter what other people think of it and no matter what they say about you for liking it.

My ‘yogurt top’ is a music piece I learned about four years ago when I was doing my junior research project about what makes us human. Because I didn’t really know what else to say, I said music. From the interviews I had to conduct, I learned about a music piece called 4’33”by John Cage. It’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds long and done in 3 movements. The whole piece is composed of rests or silence.

This will be something I defend for all of the forever’s for several reasons: I think it’s brilliant, it made me think, and it gave me over two pages of things to talk about in that paper four years ago.

While you sit and listen to 4’33” in supposed silence, you realize there is no such thing as true silence. Even if you’re in a dark, locked room you will still hear your breath and your pulse. Now, if you’re in an orchestra hall full of people being forced to sit in a possibly awkward silence for over four and a half minutes you will hear a lot of things. Masses of people breathing, shuffling their feat, coughing, shifting, doing whatever people do.

Where there is life, there is noise. Where there is noise, there is no silence. Humans can seem to find music in anything. We’ve all done it, probably. Hitting a beat out on the steering wheel while the blinker is going, or something like that. Basically, I ranted on like that for two pages and I got a rather good grade. But I digress.

I still think that the yogurt tops in the MoMA are stupid.