Now, I love me an art museum.

In Chicago, we have a world class one, and I have a number of opinions on others in other places (the Louvre is overrated, Milwaukee is underrated, LA’s is my first love).

I don’t do contemporary art, for the most part, for reasons I might get into at a later time. Therefore, I haven’t been to the Museum of Contemporary Art in some time, maybe three times in the past 20 years. For comparison, I go to the Art Institute at least once every couple of months.

A friend of mine was in town, and was staying over by the MCA, so we decided to go.

We saw a lot of things, and I maintain that their gift shop is also pretty good, but I was taken by one exhibit in particular that had so much promise and really got across a new meaning of art to me.

So, Paul Pfeiffer does a lot about sports stars and celebrities and wants to examine the connection between us as spectators and them as the watched. The exhibit has a bit of arresting photography and videography; photos of basketball stars edited where they are the only ones in the frame. Videos of the Stanley Cup being hoisted…but with the players edited out. Very arresting stuff.

But what I quickly took a liking to was a work made up of sound. In a work called The Saints, there is a large room with numbers speakers and acoustic amplifiers, and he recorded a stadium of 10,000 people reacting to a soccer match. IN the midst of this huge room, you are the center, you are on the pitch as this raucous, unseen environment resounds around you. We are aware of our great cathedrals of sport, but how many of us are familiar with that sense of being the gladiators competing on the floor of the Colosseum? It was a sense unlike no other, and captured gig tally and in stereo with a number of microphones and played at loud volume, this was unlike most anything I’d absorbed, mainly because this kind of thing is viewed as contemporary art and not, say, avant-garde or other modes of art that are not of the paper/clay/marble varietals.

So, yeah. Sound as art.