
BEST OF 2022
ONE OF MY COLLEAGUES once compared listening to a lecture by the great art historian T. J. Clark to being taken for a drive on a warm sunny day. The car roof is down, the wind is blowing in your hair, the driver knows where he’s going, and the journey is sheer pleasure. The lecture-performance, by contrast, is often another matter. John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, 1949, arguably the first example of the genre, is the opposite of a smooth cruise in a convertible. With a repetitive structure and self-reflexive content, it’s more like circling around the parking lot until you run out of gas.
Since