TAKE IT BACK
Does anyone decide what music you like to listen to?If your answer is no,
then why should experts decide what visual art you like?
YOUR experience matters most — not professional theories and dogmas.
TRUST YOURSELF,
you already do when it comes to music!
Harald Flor was one of Norway’s most important art critics and, for many years, the art critic at Dagbladet, which at the time placed great emphasis on cultural coverage. Dagbladet was one of Norway’s leading national newspapers, and Hans Fredrik Dahl wrote the following when Harald Flor passed away in 2018:
“When Harald Flor joined Dagbladet in 1972, visual art mattered enormously — one could almost say it meant everything — in the public perception of the world. Later, it was displaced by other forms, above all music, which now fills everything with its overwhelming presence. But back then, it was visual art. It defined our history, filled our present, and was in the process of shaping the chaotic worldview through the formal language of modernism.”
Should visual art then compete with music?
Of course not.
Let them meet instead — without either being subordinate to the other.
TAKE BACK THE COLLABORATION
REFLECTIONS IN THE FORM OF QUOTATIONS
As early as 1985, in an interview in UKS Nytt, and then I said something very similar to what I have written above:
“I think one of the problems today is that, in our culture, understanding is regarded as something greater than experience. People have to accept their own experience […]
I would argue that an active experience is greater than understanding, because it is more multidimensional than understanding.”
David Balzer, Curationism (2015)
“Curator porn may be a mere decoy, but it is also content, a common method of marketing institutional shows and, especially, biennials. The more recognizably outfitted the star curator, the better.”
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (1975)
“What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial. In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”
Tate Liverpool Tune in, turn on, light up
Roundhouse UFO Club, 1967 — a short movie
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