Scoring, Casting, Instilling: the Kunsthalle for Music

Ari Benjamin Meyers’s Kunsthalle for Music is simultaneously an institution, an exhibition, a concert, a music collection, a process, and an ensemble. In this essay, I invite readers to join me in a tour of the show’s first presentation, followed by reflections on questions that it posed directly. In particular, the project troubles the issue of art’s mediums, their relation to art as a concept and its institutional form(s), and art’s mode of cultural transmission or persistence through time. The philosopher of art Peter Osborne, who has written on and presented at the Kunsthalle, provides my theoretical foil alongside Theodor Adorno and Rosalind Krauss. I add musings by Jean-Luc Nancy as a further twist to consider how the project exhibits liveness and its musical significance.