We dropped by Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum on Saturday night to catch the opening of Participation Nation, an exhibition focused on projects that nudge viewers out of their passive role as mere observers and invite them to actually contribute to the art on display. I wasn’t in the door three seconds when what to my wondering eyes did I spy but a project honoring the work of Maryanne Amacher, courtesy the friendly folks at Neighborhood Public Radio.
Even if you are not lucky enough to live in Baltimore, you can join in the fun. According to NPR:
As part of the Baltimore Contemporary Museum’s PROJECT 20 series, celebrating their 20th Anniversary, Neighborhood Public Radio will host a coast-to-coast audio-project for broadcast.
In homage to sound pioneer Maryanne Amacher, who died in October, NPR will re-imagine her seminal radio-locative sound project CITY LINKS (1967) as a community remix project to be aired locally in Baltimore, and streamed to Portable Radio Instruments for broadcast in San Diego, Chicago, and Albuquerque.
Broadcasts will occur every Sunday night at 9pm (EST).
We will collect these recordings every week and remix and process them for broadcast. We will also post the files on our website, inviting anyone to remix and reuse the recordings.
If you remix these sounds, send them to: nprphoneup@gmail.com and we’ll put them on the air.
I’ve had some conversations lately with creators in which they lamented an observed trend towards increasing self-involvement among their audience–a fear of the “my opinion should count because I can Twitter it” critical leveling on display of late. Wouldn’t this mark the beginning of the end for great artistic expression? Wouldn’t quality be washed out with tsunami force when anyone, regardless of expertise, could participate?
I thought about this as I walked through the exhibitions, particularly one room in which participants had created shrines inside plain wooden boxes. Whether the individual behind each box was honoring a lost loved one or an abandoned vice, the quiet, personal works were remarkably affecting. If this show is an example of what comes when more members of a community are invited to take a creative role, we have little to fear and much to learn from our neighbors.
This is the culmination of the “you can make art out of anything” and “anyone can make art” philosophies.
In the age of anxiety, where “anything goes” and there seems to be a fear of saying, “that’s a piece of crap without artistic merit”, YES, anyone can make art.
the problem arises when people think that this gives them a license to eschew training and make art.
I live in a town of 12,000 that has about 20 art galleries. One gallery was owned by a woman who took 4 art classes and decided she was a professional artist. Another, an artist run gallery full of unschooled dilettantes, retirees and sunday painters advertised that their art was as good as the art in any gallery in the world.
Needless to say, both galleries are no longer in business.
These are perfect examples of the principle of “people who don’t know what they don’t know”.
Because art is seen as an innocuous undertaking this thinking appears to be fine with the masses but god help us if it spills over into brain surgery.
As a trained professional artist this bothers me somewhat but fortunately, there are still educated people in the world with taste and discernment.