19.06.2008, at 6 p.m.

 

 

If sound art is but a genre of music – are the remaining ones not art? This banal question is only seemingly absurd. Who and when acknowledges that music is art? Under what circumstances is music not accepted – or does it not accept itself – into this ennoblement? Relationships between music and art have never been unambiguous, yet in the second half of the 20th century they became subject to commercial, political, fund-raising and aesthetic game which involves an exceptional number of paradoxes and/or hypocrisy. Music happens to be art, art happens to be music – yet perhaps, most of all, music is a specific “art” of moving inside, outside and on the verges of the institutional world of “art”.

Michał Libera majored in sociology at Warsaw University and is working on his PhD thesis about memory in music. He is a promoter at plain. music agency (improvised music). He contributed to “Jazz & Classics” and “Kultura Współczesna”. He lives and works in Warsaw.