Institutions Against Art Music—Curation, Rehearsal, and Contemporary Art

This chapter analyses the work of contemporary artists who use alternative institutions to challenge accepted notions of art music. Kevin Beasley’s 2019 curatorial collaboration with The Kitchen, Assembly, reframes heterogeneous musics as contemporary art through the transformational act of curation. In Rehearsing Philadelphia (2022), Ari Benjamin Meyers displays the process of musical rehearsal within temporary music organisations. The chapter contends that whereas Meyers devalues a range of music by refiguring it as rehearsal, Beasley and The Kitchen transvaluate musical practices historically understood as nonart into contemporary art—and, potentially, into art music—via the powers of the curator. Beyond calls to throw out labels and categories, such projects turn on the concrete determination of what art music is while implicating contemporary art in its potential critical reconstruction.