![]() ![]() ![]() I was curious to see how MoMA was going to pull that off. She is, of course, famous for her costumes and makeup, but there isn’t much there in terms of sculptural objects, drawings or anything else traditionally considered fine art, even in a loose sense. ![]() Björk certainly is an exceptionally gifted artist in her medium - which is primarily music but also extends toward digital innovation. SB: I was skeptical from the get-go, doubting that a retrospective of a musician, no matter how innovative and groundbreaking, could be pulled off by a visually focused museum. What kind of an expectation did you have about what a visual retrospective of her work would be? Todd Simmons: I was a little confused about what exactly the curator, Klaus Biesenbach, was hoping to accomplish with this presentation of Björk’s extraordinary audio and visual work. What were your first impressions after leaving the museum? Stephanie Buhmann: So here we are, two longtime Björk fans, who went to MoMA with our 16-month-old daughter in tow, hoping for an incredible event. Courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian. New York, 2| Björk, still from “Black Lake,” commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, 2015. The streamlined production offers fewer embellishments than on later albums, but there's a different set of pleasurers to be found in music that can achieve so much with a concise pallet of carefully chosen elements.11 West 53 St (between 5th and 6th avenues) Tracks like "Venus As a Boy" do not contain an ounce of fat - they have a definite thesis statement to make and they present it efficiently. She's an exuberant creative force here with synapses firing at full capacity. So a lot of the time the term "dated" is really inconsistently and arbitrarily assigned.ĭebut works as both a time capsule of 90s electronic music culture AND as a showcase of Bjork's laser-focused songwriting skills. Beyonce just made an album with some very 90s sounding tracks on it, and I imagine some of her fans who have embraced this would have previously turned their nose up at actual 90s dance music. Then again, there are a lot of younger artists who are going to great lengths to make their music sound intentionally dated (Ultraflex being a good example, or CFCF) so its hard to generalize here. And they are free to think that, of course, but it's also clear they just haven't done their homework. Stuff from the 90s (especially electronic music) feels more niche because it hasn't had as long to seep into the general public yet, just like how even normies are now conditioned to perceive 1950s & 60s mid-century modern style as "cool" but 80s pomo is still "tacky." I love how early Aphex Twin is early-90s timestamped but someone younger may just find it cheap sounding. Furthermore it feels like a really flimsy criticism because eventually all music acquires value as an artifact of an era, like how so much 1970s music sounds great now specifically because it "sounds like the 70s." "Dancing Queen" for example is inextricably tied to its decade, with that lush disco production encapsulating all the unashamed naivety and excess of those times. All it means is that an artist was inspired to create something that spoke to the spirit of the times and captured the sound of an era, only to have successive generations frame this as a weakness because they aren't able to imagine what it would have been like to experience the music in its original context. Criticizing something for sounding "dated" is kind of a useless and short-sighted take. ![]()
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