"You cannot always make such big exhibitions, because they consume too much time and energy"
About this Quote
There is a quiet, almost anti-spectacle provocation in Alva Noto's line: the biggest gestures are often the least sustainable. Coming from an artist whose work thrives on precision, systems, and controlled intensity, the phrase reads less like complaint and more like a production ethic. The word "exhibitions" isn’t just about gallery shows; it’s shorthand for the whole machinery of contemporary visibility: shipping, installation, tech requirements, PR cycles, the social expectation of a "moment". The subtext is blunt: scale is a tax.
What makes it land is the tension between cultural demand and artistic reality. The art world rewards bigness - immersive installations, festival-sized presentations, the kind of work that photographs well and travels better as hype than as experience. Alva Noto, shaped by electronic music and audiovisual performance, knows how quickly that apparatus eats the very resource the work depends on: attention. Time and energy aren’t romantic abstractions here; they’re studio hours, soundchecks, file management, troubleshooting, the slow labor of refinement.
There’s also a veiled critique of prestige. "Big exhibitions" sound like success, but he frames them as consumption, not achievement. It’s a reminder that an artist’s output is governed by bandwidth as much as inspiration, and that constant escalation can flatten experimentation into logistics. In a culture obsessed with more - bigger tours, larger installations, louder narratives - this is a small sentence defending the right to work at a human scale.
What makes it land is the tension between cultural demand and artistic reality. The art world rewards bigness - immersive installations, festival-sized presentations, the kind of work that photographs well and travels better as hype than as experience. Alva Noto, shaped by electronic music and audiovisual performance, knows how quickly that apparatus eats the very resource the work depends on: attention. Time and energy aren’t romantic abstractions here; they’re studio hours, soundchecks, file management, troubleshooting, the slow labor of refinement.
There’s also a veiled critique of prestige. "Big exhibitions" sound like success, but he frames them as consumption, not achievement. It’s a reminder that an artist’s output is governed by bandwidth as much as inspiration, and that constant escalation can flatten experimentation into logistics. In a culture obsessed with more - bigger tours, larger installations, louder narratives - this is a small sentence defending the right to work at a human scale.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Alva
Add to List
