WMV Music Web Log

We just got back from Paris. Here is Marilyn in front of a Josef Beuys poster, at Gordon Pym & fils gallery. We were shooting pictures in front of the window (because of the Beuys photo), and then noticed that the guy in the gallery, who turned out to be Gottfried Tollmann, was playing a guitar. We went in, talked, and heard amazing blues guitar. It was very hard to leave.

"Creativity isn't the monopoly of artists. This is the crucial fact I've come to realise, and this broader concept of creativity is my concept of art. When I say everybody is an artist, I mean everybody can determine the content of life in his particular sphere, whether in painting, music, engineering, caring for the sick, the economy or whatever. All around us the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped or created. But our idea of culture is severely restricted because we've always applied it to art. The dilemma of museums and other cultural institutions stems from the fact that culture is such an isolated field, and that art is even more isolated: an ivory tower in the field of culture surrounded first by the whole complex of culture and education, and then by the media which are also part of culture. We have a restricted idea of culture which debases everything; and it is the debased concept of art that has forced museums into their present weak and isolated position. Our concept of art must be universal and have the interdisciplinary nature of a university, and there must be a university department with a new concept of art and science".

Josef Beuys, 1979, From an interview with Frans Hak