I assume you two understood that is what I was saying. My point was that one cannot compare a painting to an effect. The fact is painting is not a performance art, which gets in the way considerably, but there is some comparison to be had here. Dan is insisting that one effect can be superior in quality to another. With absolutely no other considerations. I am saying that the magician "makes" the effect into it's final form.

Give flour to a master chef and to someone who doesn't cook. The end results will be very different. Why? They used the same ingredients, the end product should be the same. We, of course, know this to not be true. We know that the ingredients do not make the final product what it is. Now someone is going to say that using better ingredients will result in a better finished product. True, but using the finest flour you can find, and a bunch of other realy cheap ingredients will still result in garbage. Let us assume that the effect is one of our ingredients. We will call it flour. If I use any flour that meets the FDA requirments for sale, will my finished product be any different if I use the finest flour that can be purchased on this planet? Maybe, but I think not very much.

I am not a chef. I am a magician. Assuming that an effect belongs in my routine, the "quality" of that effect doesn't matter. Whatever effect fits my style, theme and flow is the best effect I could possibly use. My style, theme, and flow varies from performance to performance, from genre' to genre', from venue to venue. As such, an effect may be perfect for one performance, but terrible for another. Then there are all the other magicians out there in the world. I'm betting their styles, themes, and flows differ from mine. As such, they would want different effects than I would, or in some cases the same ones. Whatever effect fits into thew style, theme, and flow is the strongest effect ever. Any other effect will be weak. Regardless of how "Strong" that effect may be, standing alone.

That's true...the creation IS the entire work, when it comes to painting, so I'll offer you a different analogy. Shakespeare's plays are better than mine. If you went to a play I wrote, and saw great actors in the roles, it wouldn't be as good an experience as if you saw good actors in Hamlet. Certainly, it wouldn't be as good if the actors were the same. I think the interplay between writing a play and acting in it is the correct analogy. Actors will make a play better or worse, depending on their ability, but they're still performing someone else's creation. Certain roles may complement an actor's strengths or cause his weaknesses to stand out painfully, but above and beyond that is the starting point -- the writing of the play itself. Similarly, a good magician can make a fairly mundane creation into a great presentation (watch David Neighbors do the ball and vase sometime), and hack magicians can ruin a great effect. You may not agree with statement, but if you do, notice that you are recognizing that there IS such thing as a great effect.

All I'm trying to say is that if the other things are equal, i.e. good magician choosing appropriate material for his personality, audience, and setting, some effects are still better than others. The creation of a magic effect is an artistic endeavor. It's not the ONLY artistic endeavor that goes into the performance of a magic effect (indeed, the performance of the magician is much more relevant), but the creation IS, still, an artistic endeavor, and some art is better than other art.

Um, actualy, I'm recognising that popular opinion recognises good and bad effects. I use those terms because the people I am attempting to explain these thoughts to use those terms. I also know what they realy mean by good, bad, strong, and weak effects. They mean that the effect blew them away when they saw it. Difficult manouvers not withstanding, fooling magicians is of no aid to being a good one. It's popular, but not useful.

Many "strong" effects incorperate one or both of two elements:
1. Previously unknown, to the magic populous, elements of misinformation.
2. Difficult moves, previously unknown, or unmastered by the magic populous.

Neither of those elements will help you perform any better for a layaudience. You see, for the layaudience, all unexposed magic effects meet those criteria, and as such, are all the same. The funny part is that this all goes back to another complaint I have had for a while. The magic community needs to quite onvesting so much time in fooling itself, and invest a lot more time into doing it's job, entertaining the audience.