Will Travel for Art

[ashnistrike]

Retrieved from a conversational tangent, last, night, that went in a different direction.  What art are you willing to travel for--that is, spend longer on the road than you do experiencing the art?  For me, this usually means that something is not only transcendently wonderful, but relatively rare.  The three that I can think of are

• Live performances of Spem in Alium, Tallis's 40-part Motet. I've managed to stumble into a performance once, looking for free things to do on my birthday one year in Amherst, and haven't managed to come within 500 miles of one since.  Recorded, the motet is a particularly beautiful example of multi-choral singing, and doesn't come remotely close to the experience of sitting in a circle of 40 voices weaving in and out and around each other, creating a complete universe out of song.  I haven't yet tried Janet Cardiff's 40-speaker installation, currently at the Cloisters.


• Live performances of Sassafrass's Sundown opera.  I've caught parts of it live, most notably at last year's Vericon, which I actually went to instead of a Spem in Alium performance the week before.  Sassafrass comes across more fully in recording than the motet, partly because the lyrics are a larger part of the point, but live still makes a difference.


• Dale Chihuly installations. Chihuly does things with blown glass that are beautiful and eldritch and possibly batrachian and gibbous.  But in a good way.

I would travel for Cirque du Soleil, but the barrier is more often money than distance.  I would travel for Shakespeare if I had to, or for Hudson River School paintings, trilobite fossils, or new books by my favorite authors.  Fortunately not all beautiful things are rare.  However, there's a particular delight in managing to track and experience something that still is. 

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Rare and fleeting things, that is, not a rock, a city, or a wood? I travelled a great way many times to hear the Watersons (who were my muses). I've journeyed for Vermeers, for an Andy Goldsworthy installation, for Shakespeare.

Fortunately, I had only to walk through the tail end if a blizzard for Spem in Alium, a work in time and space.

Nine

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I would, having seen him live once, give serious consideration to travelling for a Leonard Cohen concert. And also definitely for really good Shakespeare.

Also, in the last few years, daharyn and I have a couple of times synchronised one or the other of us travelling from Montreat to NY or vice versa to both see VNV Nation.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Cirque du Soleil, YES.

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

I've done trips to NYC for various Broadway shows.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I went to New York to see the play of Dhalgren. And I may go to Atlanta to see Sundown again, if that's where it's happening again.

But it's usually conversation I travel for, not art, though if art it available I'll take it.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

I suppose you wouldn't count serendipitous detours on the way to other places (on one long trip we stumbled upon a "treasures of the tsars" show in Topeka, of all places, that we'd have been willing to travel to somewhere else besides Topeka for in a separate trip if its next destination hadn't been 'back to Russia', so we, ahem, adjusted our plans to see it then and there, and I'm still very glad we did 'cos FABERGE EGGS), so the most going-to-lengths-to-see that I can think of off the top of my head is driving to Toronto and back to see a Munch exhibit that included a version of "the Scream". (We were based half a day away at the time, so it was a day-trip, but still...) Given the parameters of my life, IE that the person in the household who can actually drive is a visual-artist, most of what tends to rise to "...yeah, I could be arsed to do that despite it being slightly insane" is visual-arts type stuff, and often involves being going somewhere nearby it anyway (there was this other time we took a couple-hour detour to see Carhenge...)