The Mortification of Ornette Coleman

A Personal Story of Transcending the Transactional — The Triumph of Art Over Content

Art is often misunderstood; content is always optimized.
The passage from content to artistry involves resisting optimization.

Just before the American jazz legend Ornette Coleman was set to take the stage for his 1974 benefit concert at the Trieste psychiatric hospital, located at the far eastern point of Italy on the border with Yugoslavia, a 50-year old patient named Rosetta Lojacono unexpectedly walked onto the stage and started playing the harmonica. Coleman watched with scene unfold, knowing the fate that normally awaited people who act out in these institutions.

Few places are associated with coercion and conformity more than the psychiatric asylums of the past, where patients were often forced medication, put in straitjackets and cages, given freezing baths and electroshock therapy, even lobotomies. Their civil rights were stripped, depriving them of the right to get married, have children, or receive an inheritance.

Basic human freedoms were trampled on. With the advent of modern behavioral psychology and what I call technological thinking — which arose roughly in tandem with the development of the first computers — human beings…