Laurie Anderson is bored with the avant-garde:
Maybe you've noticed: The mainstream isn't that mainstream anymore. This spring, hordes of tourists stopped by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art to see performance specialists re-create artist Marina Abramovic's signature works, balancing nude on bicycle seats and lying for hours under the weight of a human skeleton. Lady Gaga, with her Madonna-on-acid videos, has laid waste to the pop charts, inspiring a wave of leather ball gowns and freakish eyewear. The avant-garde has taken over, and it all started with Laurie Anderson. The godmother of the New York art scene, Anderson and her pioneering performances loom large over contemporary artists and musicians. Before mash-up artists used their laptops to whip dance halls into a frenzy, Anderson had invented a "talking stick" to allow her to play MIDI samples onstage. Before Auto-Tune became a focal point in hip-hop battles, Anderson was using various software to manipulate her voice. Her work blends experimental composition with pop synthesizer beats, mixing the aesthetics of the gallery spaces in Chelsea with sounds from the underground jazz clubs of the Lower East Side.
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