How Do We Experience Art?

That was supposed to be the subject of this lecture.

As Geoff Dyer, author of The Ongoing Moment and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, took the stage at the auditorium at the Getty Center, he insisted: “It’s important that you don’t know what this talk is going to be about.”

I was all ears and didn’t know what to expect. One hour later I was even more confused and amused.

Dyers’ talk was mainly about landmarks. He recalled landscapes from his youth. Next, unable to find Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Instead he came across “The Questioner of the Sphinx”, by Elihu Vedder. It seemed to Dyer an emblematic way of experiencing a landscape.

His wanderings brought him further to a square with poles and land art. He described Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, one of the great Land Art projects of the 1960s and 1970s … a sensational bit of marketing, an experience “almost unphotographable.” But unlike most art, it permits “freedom of behavior and response.” “And do not expect to see God appear at the field, there is no room for God”, Dyer ended his lecture.

Mesmerized by his words, now I have to read his books.