The Art of Noise

For many urban dwellers, tussling with a wall of urban noise is a zero-sum game: Either submit to the discordant city orchestra of bleating horns and wailing sirens or, as Jamie Lauren Keiles suggested in the New York Times Magazine, stock up on disposable foam earplugs in an effort to seal a membrane between self and sound. With little nubs stuffed in your ears, she wrote, “everything is the same as before except thrillingly dampened.” Faced with the prospect of some muddied, disorienting medley (even below decibel levels at which it is baldly dangerous), the more appealing choice—maybe even the only way to think clearly—is to hear nothing at all.

A new exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan takes issue with that premise. First, it distinguishes between hearing and listening—the involuntary fluttering of the eardrum and a band of tiny bones, versus something sustained and mindful. Then it imagines listening as restorative as opposed to exhausting, and proposes that deep listening connects us to traditions and to each other.