Fans of The National, are you prepared? The Brooklyn band is going to perform the same song ‘Sorrow’ off their album ‘High Violet’, for 6 straight hours at MOMA’s PS1 on May 5th. It’s an okay song, going crescendo with Matt Berninger’s deep baritone, but can you really listen to it for that long?
Okay, it’s not really a concert although you can already buy the $15-piece tickets for the performance here, but it is part of an exhibit by Icelandic artist Ragnar ‘Lothbrok’ Kjartansson, who declared about the ‘piece’ that ‘by stretching a single pop song into a day-long tour de force the artist continues his explorations into the potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound.’
Right! How does this work for you Mr. Kjartansson? You make people play their own song for 6 long hours (it’s damn long!) and this is your piece? How is this art or a new creation? ‘The potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound’?? I am sorry to not ‘get’ modern art sometimes – although I should never apologize in such circumstances – but this is one of the most pretentious things I have read for a long time.
I did a little research about Ragnar ‘Lothbrok’ Kjartansson and he was one of the filmmakers who was commissioned by Sigur Ros to create a video for one of their songs off their album ‘Valtari’. And the guy did a very strange one for ‘Ég anda’, showing people having diner, choking on food, and basically making a sort of instructional video about the Heimlich maneuver! A real curiosity, that I definitively can’t reconcile with Sigur Ros’ ethereal sound. Anyway he is an artist and he is gonna make people listen to 'Sorrow' for 105 times, I did the maths!