The entertainment side of our magic is fiction, a lie, art, its effect cannot be measured or comprehended rationally and therefore it is magic. It casts a magic spell on the audience, causing them to suspend their rational faculties, go along with it and enter the spirit of the thing. Could anything possibly be more amazing than this?

I'm not sure what you are saying. Are you saying magic is ... amazing?

I am saying that art is magic. Fiction causes the audience to willingly suspend their disbelief and this effect cannot rationally be explained by scientists and it is therefore magic. I am saying the entertainment side of our magic, as opposed to the magic experiment, is offered and received as fiction and it alone has this magical effect on the audience, which cannot rationally be explained.

Is this the same thing with most movies, especially fiction? Same with all animated movies?

Tommy, I aprreciate ALL thoughts,..'struggles'(🙃),
with the theme....'Art'! 👍
...so many shy away, from the thought-work,
dispensing it as,...'subjective'.

First, I'd like to say: I,...find mixing the concepts 'Art' and 'Entertainment',..🤔
a bit problematic.*

That aside,..let's talk. 🙂

I'm a wandering performer and work, as such.
Once, while working an 'Arts & Crafts Fair',
I stopped at a spot where two crossing paths intersected,
creating a third path.
I decided to set up and play a Show,...there.

One of the 'sellers' approached saying:
"This will disrupt EVERYTHING.
The 'natural flow' of the Market.
You can't do that!..!
AND,..it won't worked ANYWAY!"

Well,...you know what happened.
I did,..
and it did.
It was great.
Then, I packed-up and everything re-turned,
...'to normal'.

It hit me:
Art,..is,...the calculated alteration of nature.

😐 In five words,...Art defined. 🙃

Back to you and your thoughts,..
Yes, Art IS magical,
but,
Artists for some part,
DO know what they are going for!
...not they they are in complete control(!),
but....
'Magic' tends to imply,..."out-side secret powers". 👻

I hate to say this,
it ALWAYS comes over WRONG(!),
..but,.
I find Art is 'God-ly'.**
Artists, are trying to put something there,
in their world,
...that wasn't there before.
I think somewhere in the Bible, there's the bit:
"God was a...'Creator' "

Anyways,...expanding 'reality'(!).
If it happens,...often enough,
maybe 'things',..'Nature',..does,....change(?).

Thanks for reading,..THIS FAR(!) 🙂
Thanks for tickling(!..!). ☺️
gallagher

*Art pushes,..makes demand from people.
Entertainment,...passes their time.

No upper-ground here,
...just,
different.

** 'God-ly' tends to induce thoughts of 'universal,...supremacy'.
,..therefore: Worship.
I DON'T find this,..or mean this.
I believe 'Gods' can be pretty down-to-earth-screwballs,..
like you and me. 🤗

Great thoughts here.

I'll add: IF.

IF is a great lever that turns humans into Gods.

"IF that stick were a sword..."
"IF I came from the planet Krypton..."
"IF this blank piece of paper were a note from you that says you love me..."
"IF you were my long lost brother..."

IF is a weapon that requires no power, but gives us all power. It allows us to experience and perform lies like truth.

Sweet Magic

I chanced upon a woeful man
staring at a bowl of candy.
“Alas,” he cried out forlornly,
“I am on a diet – so unfair.”

So, I took pieces in fingertips
and performed a bit of magic –
vanishes and transpositions
with the aid of a coffee cup.

“My soul is now full by any rate,”
he laughed and strolled away.
And no one missed the candy –
for magic knows not of diet.

There are two ways for the artist to approach the presentation of the impossible.

He can create the experience of the impossible through story, in which the audience imaginatively participate in the story's telling or enactment. They experience "flying" vicariously through the eyes of the characters in Peter Pan, Harry Potter or Superman.

"Our Magic" presents a different approach. We create the experience of the impossible directly for the audience. We create a "story" for the audience to tell later, about what they experienced with the magician. It is the false memory of a story that was deliberately crafted to seem real and believable.

Maskelyne and Devant discuss the differences and the relationship between these two different intentions, and how they can be combined in such way that they work together without interfering with the intended artistic goal.

None of which rationally explains the effect of the entertainment. All we can say is that it transforms the even the most rational amongst us into dreamers.

I think that is it, exactly, tommy! The confrontation with the impossible creates a dilemma that can't be resolved with deductive logic. This creates a burr under the saddle of the brain that causes cognitive dissonance. There is no such thing as the impossible/I just saw the impossible.

In order to resolve the conflict the brain is forced into creative, inductive reasoning. What if?

This leads us into fantasy. The magician can suggest the sort of fantasy in his entertaining presentation. His patter is like the cape of the matador. The sword is the dilemma.

There comes a time in every strange person’s life when he must get serious and that time is after the Turtle with the human head and friends have played their magical roles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfsJ8rgKIFo

"There comes a time in every strange person’s life when he must get serious"

I'm going to hold out until I am 104 and they take away my driver's license.

Suspension of disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is the intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something surreal, such as a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment. Aristotle first explored the idea of the concept in its relation to the principles of theatre; the audience ignores the unreality of fiction in order to experience catharsis.

The phrase "suspension of disbelief," noted the columnist Alan Nathan in The Washington Times, "is a literary term of art referring to one of Aristotle's principles of theatre in which the audience accepts fiction as reality so as to experience a catharsis, or a releasing of tensions to purify the soul."

It seems, nobody really knows what Aristotle meant by catharsis.

I do not know about it purifying the soul but I think that it releases tensions is interesting. It suggests that anything of a fictional nature gets the audience to relax, suspend their critical thinking or logic. I do not know but perhaps something of a fictional nature would better for misdirection, than something of a factual or practical nature.

"Cardini covers up every steal with a carefully designed, natural gesture. The monocle drops from his eye as he registers bewilderment; in that moment a steal has been made. A laugh comes when he blows smoke through a monocle he has been wearing, without a glass: another crucial move has occurred."

I will say that those two covers are of a fictional nature, being part of the fictional story Cardini is trying to get across. A factual or practical cover, in contrast, would be "But let us make sure that these are the for queens. Please check them!" The latter is where the audience is using their rational faculties, the former is where they are suspended. Or so it seems to me. Perhaps not, perhaps those Cardini covers are effects being used as covers?

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible... Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”