When I look at Moschen (and my personal favorite, Greg Kennedy), I'm reminded of the history of visual art (painting in particular). There was a time when being

When I look at Moschen (and my personal favorite, Greg Kennedy), I'm reminded of the history of visual art (painting in particular). There was a time when being a great painter meant being able to capture a scene or a moment with verisimilitude or with emotion, and a painter could make a healthy living (possibly not opulent or luxurious, but not necessarily starve-in-the-gutter poor) by capturing portraits for clients who could afford that kind of opulence. It took a particular refined set of skills to translate the world of sensory data coming in through the eye to paint on canvas. The invention of photography basically gutted that kind of painting. People wonder why painting went to modernism and post-modernism; part of the story is that the entire skillset of "faithfully rendering the real" had been rendered economically obsolete by cameras, so an artist who didn't want to starve had to render something else. Similarly, it matters little how much discipline, effort, and grit it takes to perfect an on-stage juggling routine if the audience doesn't bother to come to the stage. Moschen and Kennedy's style brings people something they know they've never seen before, even though they don't know juggling. It's postmodern juggling. ;)