TAKE IT BACK
Does anyone else 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!
“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.”
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (1975)
“Contemporary art seems put there by a production designer.”
David Balzer, Curationism (2015)
“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.”
Hans Fredrik Dahl, Dagbladet (2018)
Should visual art compete with music?
Of course not.
Let them meet instead — without either being subordinate to the other.
TAKE BACK THE COLLABORATION
PS — As early as 1985, in an interview in UKS Nytt, 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.”
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The Links:
Tate Liverpool
Tune in, turn on, light up
https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-4-summer-2005/tune-turn-on-light
Roundhouse / UFO Club, 1967 — film
https://youtu.be/u5A7J6Wu20Q?is=cgP2-zCpNZiM1qNM
Tom Wolfe — The Painted Word (1975)
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Painted_Word.html?id=X5CX0QEACAAJ
David Balzer — Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else
https://www.plutobooks.com/product/curationism/
Hans Fredrik Dahl — “Harald Flor var en seende, reisende og tenkende mann”, Dagbladet (2018)
https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/harald-flor-var-en-seende-reisende-og-tenkende-mann/70056284.
