Art & Creativity Quote by Jose Bergaman

Bergamin is needling a modern habit: treating music as something you watch instead of something you enter. “Better to cover your eyes than your ears” flips the expected protection reflex and lands as a sly defense of music’s sovereignty. Shut out the visuals, he implies, and you’ll hear more truth; shut out the sound, and you’ve missed the point entirely.

The intent feels double-edged. On one level it’s a practical provocation: close your eyes at a concert and the room changes. You stop monitoring the singer’s outfit, the crowd’s coolness, your own performance as an audience member. On another level, it’s a critique of culture’s addiction to spectacle. Even before today’s music-video economy and algorithmic “content,” public taste was already drifting toward the theatrical, the charismatic, the legible. Bergamin pushes back with a writer’s contrarian precision: the ear is where music does its real work, bypassing the rational gatekeepers that vision tends to recruit.

Subtext: vision is the sense of control. We look to categorize, to verify, to judge. Hearing is more porous; it gets under the skin. Covering your eyes is a small act of surrender, a refusal of the social layer that visual cues impose. It also subtly warns against confusing personality with artistry: if you must choose, choose the medium, not the mythmaker.

Contextually, it reads like an aphorism from a literate tradition that distrusted mass entertainment’s gloss. Bergamin isn’t anti-performance; he’s pro-attention. The line works because it’s a paradox that feels instantly testable. Try it, and you’ll find he’s right: the richest parts of music arrive when you stop watching for them.