© CATHY CARVER, COURTESY OF HIRSHHORN MUSEUM / TATE
To hear some of the responses to the Tate Modern’s Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind retrospective, and to read some of the reviews, you would think that Ono had fallen short of cherished career goals to be a virtuosic musician and a highly skilled draughtsman. But Ono’s art has never been concerned with displays of technique. Concept is king, and her work flourishes in the minds of people who choose to take it seriously.
An exhibition of Ono artefacts—pushed behind glass cases, with objets d’art arranged on pedestals and hung in the way that the Tate might show Picasso or Philip Guston—in a way feels antithetical to everything she has always represented. Ono herself demonstrated as much when, in 1971, her self-appointed “debut” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York involved taking advertisements in the Village Voice claiming she would be releasing swarms of flies soaked in perfume into the gallery space. There were no flies, there was no exhibition; MoMA was unaware that Ono had co-opted its brand. As Music of the Mind documents, people interviewed at the time on the street outside were, even if just for a second, invited to consider what would have happened had Ono indeed let flies loose inside that hallowed artistic space, a fantasy that transported them out of the everyday.