That paintings are to be “looked at” seems hardly worth saying, until you go to the Museum of Modern Art and find that very few of its six-million- visitors-a-year are looking at anything, or — God forbid you should pause in front of something — you get “moved along” by the guards, who may's well be muttering “nothing to see here” while they do it, like cops at a crime scene waving gawkers on.

The composer La Monte Young remarked that if he doesn't transport his listeners to heaven, he's not doing his job. How many artists today work by such ambitious standards, let alone do their job? What do critics then do when artists go on a disorganized anti-art strike?

Bret Schneider speaks with composer Katrina Krimsky about her career spanning half a century.

How did Amacher ultimately feel about being identified as a heroic “sound artist” instead of a hardworking composer who underwent a heroic rescue mission into the deepest undercurrents of music history?

A selection from Bret Schneider’s poetry cycle, Poems of the Drone Years

The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century.

Art itself doesn’t need to be defended: even when it whispers fake nothings, or indulges suspicious behavior, it speaks more than any defense ever could.

Selected Spectral Works