Should Music Have A Place In Museums?

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art unceremoniously dumped a long-running music series it had hosted for nearly two decades this spring, museum officials explained that the move was part of a decision to focus on LACMA’s core mission of bringing art to the public. Mark Swed is skeptical of this line of thinking: “Money doesn’t seem to be the overriding concern. The museum’s music programming has always been done on the cheap. Many of the series have underwriting… Never have the arts been more suited to interaction than they are now. And never before have art museums been better equipped to be laboratories for such chemical combustion.