Is It Art, Science or a Test of People?

[groovedaddy]

Over the past several years art museums have begun to place much more emphasis on a concept they call the “visitor experience.” Few, though, have attempted to define that concept quite as broadly — or as bodily — as the New Museum, which is mounting a career survey of the Belgian-born artist Carsten Höller that opens on Wednesday.

A (greatly abridged) menu of the experiences available to viewers — after they sign a legal waiver and abandon all hope of conventional museumgoing decorum — would read something like this:

Walk around while seeing the world upside down and backward. Hurtle two stories toward the earth in a metal and plastic tube as others watch and, almost certainly, laugh. Ingest an unidentified white pill, or a fistful if you choose. Inhale an amphetaminelike substance said to induce amorous feelings. Feel your nose grow. Feel the walls shift around you. Feel yourself slam face first into a tree at high speed. Or, if you really want to prove your dedication to art, take off all your clothes and lie with friends or strangers in a modified sensory deprivation tank in heavily salinized water, heated to the temperature of human skin.

Mr. Höller, 49, began his professional life as a scientist, and it is perhaps because of this that a bit of a Dr. Moreau reputation has always clung to him, though it is not wholly undeserved. He did, after all, once design wickedly funny Swiftian traps for children. (The simplest involved a seemingly live electric cord lying on the floor surrounded by pieces of candy.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/arts/design/carsten-holler-exhibition-at-the-new-museum.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28

[MisterP]

1. sounds like real Museum of Jurassic Technology stuff