Is Noise Sound Art? (2025)

I recently came across a shirt that a noise guy made that was posted on experimental musician Lea Bertucci’s site that said “The difference between sound art and noise is institutional funding.” I actually don’t really see sound art that way even though I would like to believe that what the shirt said is true. I wish it were that simple. To me, sound art comes out of the 60s and 70s movements of conceptual art and now it has become a part of what is called the “expanded field” of sculpture. My graduate school’s website still says that it grounds sound art in the tradition of the 60s and 70s conceptual framework led by Fluxus artists like John Cage. I would say, though, that really conceptual art is no longer the key movement defining sound art exclusively and that now sound art is part of the “expanded field” of sculpture—which includes but isn’t limited to conceptual art. That means that I think that we are in a new post-conceptual art era.

My undergrad alma mater the Cooper Union calls the sculpture department “sculpture and the expanded field” now. When I was in undergrad there was definitely a push towards conceptual sculpture in the sculpture department. The well-known conceptual artist Hans Haacke taught there as well as many Whitney ISP alums who worked in social practice and conceptual art. Now the text and image design motifs and architectural design work of conceptual art are used so often as presentation modes for contemporary artwork that you really can’t say that it has anything to do with the original ideological modes of institutional critique such as that in the work of Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, or John Baldessari. Thus, it has become the “expanded field” of sculpture as opposed to “conceptual sculpture.” Now the look of conceptual art comes in the form of wallpaper to frame paintings in blue chip galleries, for example, or textually as pastoral poetry read beside a sculpture on a pedestal.

Sound art really can now come across as another rhetorical flourish-like decor-for everything in the expanded field of sculpture. Because the expanded field of sculpture hasn’t always had institutional support-especially when we are thinking of its manifestation as Fluxus multiples, street happenings, earth art, or video art cable access T.V. spots-I really don’t think that I would say that one needs institutional support to have ones work read as sound art.

I don’t think that every noise show at a museum is automatically sound art. I think that when the noise band Wolf Eyes plays at a museum that they’re still responding to what makes something entertaining as music as with punk, industrial, soundtracks, or classic rock. I think that when some noise bands play at museums that they can be musically on par with other music acts that might play at something like a PS1 Warm Up night or Art Basel DJ night. Once I went to a noise festival at Deitch Projects in 2004 during a Dearraindrop show and I saw a lot of New England noise bands that were tangential to the Fort Thunder & Lighting Bolt scene. I wouldn’t say that this was a sound art festival just because it was being held in a gallery. It really felt more like someone had booked a noise rock festival inside an art venue. Again, I really do not think that “The difference between sound art and noise is institutional funding.”

As arts non-profits and museums lose institutional funding, we’ll probably see more experimental music returning to the club space. Maybe sound art will come to look more like social practice art as it loses institutional support or like performance art. The writer Brian Kane describes sound art as work that stems from the moment of conceptual art from the 60s and 70s sculpture like I would, but he also feels that sound art can be a moment that happens in a musical composition.

My favorite experimental music form really isn’t sound art. My favorite project is still Keiji Haino’s and Fushitsusha. I really like live music and the only thing that makes my work sound art is the fact that it is rooted in some histories of some more subdued Fluxus performance art when I present it live. I don’t think that I’m going to be able to get institutional funding for my work. Once I booked Tamio Shiraishi of Fushitsusha to play at a D.I.Y. venue I ran in New York. None of that involved institutional funding and none of that is something that I can include on a professional sound art C.V. Sometimes there is value in doing things just to see them exist in the world.

Now in 2025 people don’t distinguish between noise and “real” music. Maybe the new sound of SOUND is MUSIC. Sound art isn’t radical in and of itself in the gallery space anymore. Now it’s just something else in the toolbox to play with.