On the Kunsthalle for Music and (Music-)Institutional Critique

Through an exploration of the motivations behind his ‘meta-institutional’ work Kunsthalle for Music, Ari Benjamin Meyers argues that the fundamental difference between working in the institutions of music and contemporary art is that the former lacks a sustained critique of its conditions of production, presentation, and perception. By working within visual arts spaces such as the white cube, Meyers argues he is able to draw on just such a tradition of critique and institutional boundary pushing in his practice, affording a greater degree of autonomy in self-defining the parameters of the artistic work. To achieve this in music, he argues, the concept of audience understood as the product of the fundamental separation of musical production from its reception (i.e. its commodification) must be overcome.