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.
Your voice is not your instrument. Your voice is the character that you build, your innermost feelings, the things that you want to say, and your instrument is the vehicle that you use to carry the message.
Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.
The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
I compose music for films, and by the grace of God, I've got a few awards. That's it.
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
Before Turner there was no fog in London.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.