Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. There are ecstasy machines. Follow your eyes to wherever they lead you, stop, get very quiet, and the world should begin to change for you. And if you see me, say something! We can talk about it together.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the transformative experience of visiting a museum, encouraging openness to new perceptions.
Jerry Saltz invites us to approach museums not as places with predetermined outcomes but as portals to diverse experiences and emotions. He suggests that by immersing ourselves in the art and allowing our senses to guide us, we can undergo a profound transformation, discovering new worlds and meanings. The quote promotes the idea that observing art is a shared experience, where communication can deepen our understanding and appreciation.
In practice
During a gallery opening, I shared this quote to inspire guests to embrace the art around them.
'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.
Artists working for other artists is all about knowing, learning, unlearning, initiating long-term artistic dialogues, making connections, creating covens, and getting temporary shelter from the storm.
I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.
The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer's journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It's not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive.
In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.
I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.
Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god... I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.
I often use the same harmonies as pop music because the complexity of what I do is elsewhere.
I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue.
There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
I can’t worry too much about the everyday things. Otherwise I’d lose touch with my own world, that helps me as an artist, but it’s frustrating for the people around me. I’m vaguely functional, but there’s always something slightly off.
Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.
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