As you probably guessed when no post went up last Sunday, we’ve run into a scheduling issue. It’s been hard to upload posts on time. For the time being there will be no post schedule. Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere and we have a lot more to share. We don’t want to sacrifice quality in order to follow a schedule we made up.

It’s never easy to admit you’re wrong, they say. Well, I don’t completely agree. It’s not too hard for me to admit I’m wrong in real life, and I’ve admitted several times on this blog now that I’ve been wrong. Writing a whole post about it, however, is another story.

But I feel that it must be done, because I feel that I was looking at this issue completely the wrong way.

My hit piece on card tricks was just that, a hit piece, and an unnecessary one. It misrepresented my views and honestly, I don’t even really understand why I wrote it the way that I did.

I don’t want to imply that I was TOTALLY off the mark. I do believe that card tricks will usually be unmemorable. But I overstated the severity of the situation, and I missed the real point.

At the risk of saying something stupid again, I would perhaps say that most magic tricks can tend towards being unmemorable as the person experiences more of them.

This doesn’t mean that they’re always forgettable, or that the person will necessarily forget the feeling of magic that they felt. I just don’t think someone remembering that your bill in lemon trick involved a bill and a lemon counts as memorability. If it’s the only magic trick they’ve seen, then sure. If it’s the hundredth trick they’ve seen from you, that’s a different story.

So what do we do? Despair? I don’t think so. You could say the same of most art. If someone goes to a museum, do you think they’ll have a memory of the majority of the paintings they saw afterwards?

Performance arts get it especially bad. If someone goes to see a ballet, they’re unlikely to remember any but the most straightforwardly impressive moves even five minutes after the performance, unless of course they’re a ballet obsessive.

Much like ballet, good magic is formulaic. I’ve already said this about card magic, but I am now extending this to all magic.

This isn’t a reason to despair, it’s a reason to be more mindful with your magic. I often fail at this myself.

It’s also a reason for me to realize that magic doesn’t have to be memorable to be enjoyable. In my pigheaded analysis of card magic, I suggested whether intentionally or not that you should strive to do memorable magic. Who gives a shit if the trick done is memorable?

No, really, who is the person that gives a shit? Well, obviously, it’s not the audience.

We have an idea of what brings audiences to magic shows. According to the “Magic by the Numbers” survey by Joshua Jay et al., people have overwhelmingly positive associations with watching live magic performances. It follows that people want to see magic simply because it makes them feel good! But feeling good is not by itself enough to cement a memory. It turns out that something else audiences want from a performance can be.

Which brings us to the subject of the next post…