The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400, 4pm-6pm every Friday, free.

Judi Dench in 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel'

We’re not finished with Oscar season just yet! The Museum of Modern Art’s “Contenders” series, which defines every one of the year’s major films as modern art, from ParaNorman (Best Animated Film?) to The Dark Knight Rises (Best Supporting Performance by a Villain’s Mask?) will be running throughout the season. We’re dropping in this Thanksgiving Eve (don’t worry about it cutting into our holiday prep time—the relatives have always believed Citarella’s sweet potatoes are our own, and they won’t find out the truth this year!) to check out The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the summer hit that, thanks to its subject matter, may just be awards-season gold. It’s all about a posse of aged British dowagers and gents who discover deepest India—and themselves. We’re filling out our Oscar pool ballot now!

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 7pm, tickets and information can be found at http://tinyurl.com/8dayNov21.

Mr. Plant (Photo: Wikimedia)

Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant, at MOMA on Tuesday with bandmates Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Jason Bonham, son of the band’s late original drummer John, for a press conference to promote their new concert film, “Celebration Day,” entered the journalist-packed auditorium singing, “treat me like a fool...” He was clearly in a festive mood.

That mood would not last.

Ever since the 2007 concert featured in the film, a tribute to the late Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun at London’s O2 Arena, the band has said in countless interviews that they would never reunite again, largely due to Mr. Plant’s desire to focus on other projects and just generally move on. But that didn’t stop the assembled fourth estate from harping on the reunion talk, to the band’s growing annoyance.

At first, Mr. Plant showed flashes of humor. When asked if they find it difficult to watch themselves, he replied, “I used to be better looking than this.” Discussing Mr. Ertegun, Mr. Plant noted that he would talk about “everything from Coltrane, Modern Jazz Quartet, through to Ratt and White Lion.” He practically spat these last two band names, then paused for a contemptuous smirk that evoked laughter from the crowd.

But the scorn he felt toward cheesy hair metal was nothing compared to that he reserved for questions about a possible reunion. After one reporter asked if the film was in anticipation of something bigger, he replied, “We’d been thinking about all sorts of things. And then we can’t remember what we were thinking about. Schmuck.” Another asked whether after their previous reunion gigs they felt like they had “unfinished business,” and Mr. Plant seemed to be straining his face not to let his eyes roll.

Still, some did not get the message. One radio host said, “I’d like to ask a follow-up to the question posed by the schmuck, if I might.” He complimented them on the film, then said, “I don’t know that it’s gonna quench the thirst of those who wish to see you in the flesh.” Gasps of incredulity echoed through the room. “What would you say to them?”

Seven seconds of deadly silence followed, and then laughter bubbled up, almost drowning out Mr. Jones’ subdued, sing-songy answer to the question: “Sorry.” The laughter blazed anew, the moderators passed the mic to the next questioner, and twenty seconds after he had asked his question, the radio host, apparently not having heard Mr. Jones’ reply, said, “Is anybody gonna say anything?”

It took a whole three-and-a-half minutes before the next journalist jumped into the reunion fray, noting that in the film, they looked like they were having fun. “Why is it so hard to come together again?”

The band’s silence this time went on for twelve seconds before the journo implored, “can someone answer it?” A voice in the crowd cried out, “It’s been answered a million times, sir.”

'Skyfall' star Daniel Craig (Getty Images)

We’re not ready to throw in the towel on the moviegoing just yet, but we’ll admit we’re ready for a break from the heavier fare. Today we’re dropping by the Museum of Modern Art for a Bond double-header, with screenings of Diamonds Are Forever (Sean Connery, kind of campy, Jill St. John as the girl, Shirley Bassey sang the song) and Live and Let Die (Roger Moore, crazy campy, Jane Seymour as the girl, Wings sang the song). In addition to being quite generous in what they’re defining as “modern art,” this is some sort of cross-promotion for the next in line, Skyfall (Daniel Craig, super-grave, Naomie Harris as the girl, Adele—reportedly!—singing the song).

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, tickets and information can be found at www.moma.org.

A brief guide to museum ticket prices

The Museum of Modern Art announced today that it is raising the price of its adult admission from $20 to $25, effective Sept. 1.

MoMA's increase matches the hike that the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced earlier this year. However, the Met's ticket price is a suggested donation.

Prices for student tickets at MoMA are going up, as well, from $12 to $14, and a one-year individual membership, which provides free, unlimited access to the museum will climb from $75 to $85.

In a statement, MoMA cited "escalating costs in virtually all aspects of operating the museum" for the price hike.

Above, The Observer offers a brief chart of the cost of the admission at various New York art museums. (Note: the admission prices for the Met, Brooklyn Museum, Museo del Barrio, Studio Museum, Bronx Museum, and Queens Museum are suggested donations.)

Jhane Barnes (upholstery) and Ettore Sottsass (chair).

“The modern chair, which most people find too advanced today, is what they’ll like to sit in 10 years from now,” Florence Knoll said in 1953.

She was right. If you don’t know Ms. Knoll’s name, you have undoubtedly sat on her low, chrome-foot chairs: she created the look of U.S. embassies, corporations and college dormitories during the 1940s and ’50s. Ms. Knoll’s imagination gave us both the Cold War diplomat’s office and the Mad Men executive suite.

Born in Michigan in 1917, Ms. Knoll (née Schust) attended Cranbrook, the storied art school outside of Detroit, where she was a classmate of Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen. She was steered to fashion because she was a woman; she steered herself back to architecture, interning in 1939 with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer and then briefly studying with Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. This exhibition, curated by Earl Martin, Paul Makovsky, Angela Völker and Susan Ward, focuses on the Knoll firm’s use of textiles, Ms. Knoll’s specialty and a small and tactile entry point into the feel of American postwar industrial and political expansion.

Her first and only boss, Hans Knoll, a German emigré from a furniture-making family, hired Florence Schust in 1943 to design interiors for his new modern furniture company. Their inaugural commission was the secretary of war’s office in the newly built Pentagon. Ms. Knoll remembers those early years as tough: “Everything was difficult. Fabrics were difficult. Even the glues were inferior glues. Everything was on a wartime basis. We had to use ingenuity to get anything produced at all.”

She proved resourceful. Wooden benches and chairs designed by Jens Risom needed upholstery and Ms. Knoll found an ingenious wartime solution: she caned them with army parachute straps. The 1.5-inch-wide, olive-and-red ribbons distributed weight well and matched the stripped-down utilitarian look of the chairs. Ms. Knoll’s 652W Lounge Chair With Arms (1943) is the first of many innovations that became synonymous with American resourcefulness.

Hans Knoll married Florence Schust in 1946. Although a Life magazine article from the 1950s spins their romance as though she were a secretary made good (“Florence Knoll, 35, who has done many Knoll pieces, came to work for Knoll as a designer, after two years married the boss”), Florence was an equal partner. She covered Hans’s early business gaffs with $50,000 from her trust fund, providing necessary capital during the firm’s expansion. Her modernist ideas about pattern and color created a signature look.

She invited former Cranbrook classmates to design chairs, which Knoll manufactured and sold on license. They found hits with the Saarinen Womb Chair (1946) and Executive Armless Chair (1946). They opened showrooms on East 65th Street and then Madison Avenue; open spaces with great blocks of primary colors and groupings of geometric tables, couches and chairs. They branded their furniture “Equipment for Living.”

Ms. Knoll’s talent was in taking unconventional textiles used by an industry and repurposing them as interiors. It was brilliant design homeopathy. She used the flannels and tweeds from men’s suit fabrics as upholstery on the firm’s executive chairs. The sturdy weaves and subtle textures complemented the 1940s office. With limitations on traditional fibers, Ms. Knoll turned to synthetics developed for military use, like Saran, made by Dow Chemical, or DuPont’s Orlon acrylic. She turned army material technology into defense office interiors.

You already know the feel of these fabrics. Here, the show becomes Proustian, materials evoking cultural memories. These textiles are the wipeable stuff of school cafeteria walls, the ridged caning of lightweight, movable chairs in college dormitory common spaces, the nubby chenille pile of the American corporate carpet.

As the firm grew, Ms. Knoll turned to designers for new fabrics. Marianne Strengell created thick, Chanel-like tweeds. Toni Prestini conjured a cotton plain weave staple that the company produced continually from 1948 to 1982. These fabrics were technical triumphs: in Prestini, a ratiné weft alternates with a two-ply cotton/rayon warp to create illusionistic tone-on-tone dots.

The company got a colorist when it hired Eszter Haraszty in 1949. Haraszty reissued 1940s prints in bolder palettes and nailed the Knoll “look” of the 1950s and ’60s: a red-orange color, an unworried mixing of plastic, chrome, nylon and wool, tone-on-tone on white. Her “Lana” persimmon fabric on the Model 31 chair designed by Ms. Knoll (1956) is exemplary.

In the press, Knoll’s uses of industrial materials were seen as representative of American ingenuity and talent. Knoll didn’t just sell chairs—it conjured the American postwar dream to live in a new and better world. No wonder the firm was chosen to design the interiors of the American consulates in Stockholm, Havana, Copenhagen and Brussels, IBM, General Motors, the North American Life and Causality Co. and the CBS building. Their Marcel Breuer coffee tables and Saarinen Executive armchairs became as ubiquitous as gray flannel suits.

After Hans Knoll died in 1955, the company went on without a misstep until Florence Knoll retired in 1965. But afterward, despite the exhibition’s cheerleading, it seems lost. It was sold and changed names three times, and drifted away from the minimalist look and design innovation that had made its name.

Knoll is still having its effect on American identity and industry. Modernist furniture, glimpsed through New York’s condo windows, displays the ubiquitous horizontal silhouettes of Knoll’s Barcelona chairs and Ms. Knoll’s sofas. The graphic design of Google’s home page echoes Knoll’s cheerful modular look: the white space around the search box might be the friendly plastic of a Tulip Chair.

A small exhibition of seven Cy Twombly sculptures installed at MoMA takes on new significance in light of the artist’s death last week. Produced quietly during the length of Mr. Twombly’s career, the sculptures span the half-century from 1954 to 2005 like white shadows of his more famous paintings.

Like the work of his peers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Mr. Twombly’s sculptures reveal neo-Dada tastes in found materials. Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python) (1954) is assembled of wood, palm leaf fans, cloth and wire. Untitled (1976) is a telescopelike tube of cardboard. All are white—some are covered in white house paint, others by plaster—yet often vibrant glimpses of materials show through the surfaces, and their parenthetic titles evoke color.

The Virginia-born Mr. Twombly called white paint his marble, referencing his chosen home of Italy; the conflict the sculptures stage between color and noncolor, assemblage and classical austerity, modernity and history gets at the heart of his project. He was as interested in precedent as he was in the present moment. Recently purchased by the museum directly from the artist’s private collection, the sculptures are newly on display, yet now suggest a reliquary pallor; Mr. Twombly might have appreciated the peculiar poetry in this tension.

editorial@observer.com

Alec Baldwin (Getty Images)

Wednesday, July 6

Curb Appeal

Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm may be our favorite fish-out-of-water tale ever, and one of the main reasons we still subscribe to HBO (that and True Blood). It’s like seven seasons of that scene in Annie Hall where Alvy Singer goes out west and tries coke. (Ah-choo!) Now the fish has flopped back into the water: the show’s returning to New York for its new season commencing Sunday (we hear one episode will have Larry dropping by a Palestinian restaurant—Oy!), and tonight, HBO celebrates Larry and the gang with a red-carpet premiere in midtown. We’re going to try to get Susie Essman to curse us out or, failing that, convince her to curse out fellow attendees Dan Abrams (hey, bro!) or Bryant Gumbel … Meanwhile, the city’s celebutantes, music makers and music machers are at the Intrepid (strap on those sea legs!) for the so-called final birthday party for DJ Cassidy. He’s turning 30 and giving up his annual bashes—not like we haven’t heard that before. Past events have drawn music exec Lyor Cohen, nightlife king Paul Sevigny and the ubiquitous Russell Simmons, and the birthday boy tends to don a brightly colored suit for the occasion. Our sources won’t reveal the big name doing the surprise performance, but attendees are in for a treat—two years ago it was Bobby Brown! (Ah-choo!)

Curb Your Enthusiasm premiere, Time Warner Screening Room, 1 Time Warner Center, 6:15 p.m. arrivals, 7 p.m. screening, private event; DJ Cassidy birthday party, Pier 86, West 46th Street and 12th Avenue, private event.

Thursday, July 7

Sand Art

Talk about bringing the mountain to Mohammed! Every year, scads of galleries from the U.S. and abroad haul their finest wares to the Hamptons to display them to potential buyers—because, really, we don’t intend to spend the summer sweltering in Chelsea. For anyone who thinks beachfront galleries are all about sea-glass mobiles and those paintings of dogs on sand dunes, the photoHamptons exhibit, featuring Annie Leibovitz’s and Chuck Close’s portraits of Kate Moss, will be a welcome surprise. (We’re buying a few to celebrate Ms. Moss’s wedding, the only royal British wedding we care about.) The opening preview party for the artHamptons fair is held tonight inside a modular, air-conditioned building constructed just for the occasion in the middle of a Bridgehampton park—if the weather’s chilly, pretend you’re in Basel! If it’s warm, pretend you’re at Art Basel in Miami!

Sayre Park, 154 Snake Hollow Road (Bridgehampton), opening party tonight from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. to benefit LongHouse Reserve, show runs through July 10; visit arthamptons.com for tickets and complete schedule.

Friday, July 8

Going Ape

The movies this summer—so uninspiring. All the extra-extra-buttered popcorn in the world can’t tempt us to roll up to a multiplex these days. The Tree of Life? We can nap at home, thank you, and our dreams would be much more interesting. Transformers? We like robots only when they’re making us coffee and vacuuming our rugs and anchoring our talk shows (yes, Andy Cohen, we’re on to you). Today, though, brings the release of Project Nim, a documentary about a chimp adopted by humans to teach it to communicate through language. It’s a sad tale—believe it or not, apes don’t quite mesh with humans as easily as you’d think! (Not as easily as robots—and by the way, Keurig, make us another.) But we’d rather learn this valuable lesson via a thoughtful doc than by enduring the new Planet of the Apes movie later this summer. (James Franco, what have they done to you?)

Project Nim opens today.

Saturday, July 9

Cold Comfort Farm

Philosophical question: If leaving the city means attending the same old parties in a new location, shrouded by a white tent instead of the Cipriani ceiling, did you ever leave at all? Oh, never mind, have a rosé! We’ll see all those familiar, tight faces out in Sagaponack tonight as society mainstay Peter Davis, luxuriously eyebrowed model Hilary Rhoda and Harper’s Bazaar-o Mary Alice Stephenson host a party for Love Heals, a charity that provides anti-H.I.V. education to the New York City youth. It’s held at a private horse farm, so if you “love heels,” you may want to stick close to the tent to avoid stepping in a little piece of nature.

Luna Farm, 276 Parsonage Lane (Sagaponack), 7:30 p.m.; visit loveheals.org/luna for tickets and information.

Sunday, July 10

God Only Knows

We saw all the art we’d ever need to see (and some Leibovitz photos) at the artHamptons tent, so we’re not clamoring to visit the galleries at MoMA until Rothko invades in September. But we could be persuaded for a musical performance. Tonight, the New Juilliard Ensemble presents a passel of premieres, including that of Conrad Cummings’s musical meditation on the Beach Boys, I Wish They All Could Be … (Not exactly Handel, we know, but this is the same gotta-stay-with-the-times MoMA that hosted Kanye West this year.) It’s a bit cruelly ironic to play the Beach Boys for a crowd trapped in the city, but who cares? We’re dusting off our theremin!

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden opens at 7 p.m., concerts begin at 8 p.m., free with first-come, first-served seating; visit moma.org for information.

Monday, July 11

Ballets Russes

The opera season may have wound down—see you in September, when we’ll all be grasping for the Ring!—but the Metropolitan Opera House may as well be put to some use. Tonight, Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet takes up occupancy for a performance of Anna Karenina. You’ll never want to take a train again. And honey, you won’t have to: the dinner with the dancers is right there, at the Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle! Arts patrons like Alec Baldwin (whose new Woody Allen film is scheduled to begin shooting today—don’t let us keep you!), Arianna Huffington, Scott Pelley (have you seen his new CBS Evening News? Neither have we!) and the noted ballet aficionado Darren Aronofsky, director of that en pointe potboiler Black Swan, will be in attendance. If any of the dancers turns into a giant bird (spoiler!), Mr. Aronofsky’s on the case.

Performance at 8 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, dinner at 10 p.m., Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 80 Columbus Circle, dancers to arrive for after-party at 11:15 p.m.; call (203) 298-4722 or email events@wnfa.org for tickets and information.

Tuesday, July 12

What, the Frick?

We’ll be huddled in the Frick Collection’s Garden Court at the first sign of rain tonight—the annual Summer Soirée (not to be confused with tonight’s Project Lipstick Sunset Soirée at Hudson Terrace—we get it, party planners: you were all thwarted French lit majors!). The party is to be divided between the indoor Garden Court (for those who like their air conditioned) and the 70th Street Garden (for those who love fresh air, or, also, smoking! That’s allowed, right?). The evening’s chairs include a Frick herself—Emily T. Frick, in fact!—Oxford-educated interior designer Clare McKeon and glamourpuss young lawyer Lucy Jane Lang.

The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, 6:30 p.m.; visit shopfrick.org/support for tickets and information.

Wednesday, July 13

Moon Landing

Is there any author this side of Shakespeare or Stan Lee whose work has been so consistently screen-adapted as that of young Ben Mezrich? The author wrote the book on the dueling egos behind Facebook, which became The Social Network (a classic case of the movie eclipsing the book!), and his Bringing Down the House, about poker-playing geniuses, became 21 (a classic case of a Kevin Spacey movie disappearing forever!). We can’t wait for the film adaptation of Sex on the Moon, Mr. Mezrich’s newest tale of youth ambition gone wrong. Hell, we might even read this one, which chronicles a NASA intern’s quest to steal moon rocks from the agency’s vault. Today, Mr. Mezrich holds a conversation at Bryant Park’s “Word for Word Author” series with author A.J. Jacobs about the book; we’ll be there to ask whether Mr. Mezrich’s next yarn about ambition and striving will be a memoir!

Bryant Park Reading Room, 42nd Street side of Bryant Park, 12:30 p.m.; call (212) 768-4242 for information. Rain location at Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, 20 West 44th Street.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Thirty-two years old in October 1912, Pablo Picasso had one major painting under his belt (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907). He had found a smart gallerist in Daniel Kahnweiler. He had just left Montmartre for Montparnasse (neighborhoods as far away from each other as you can get in Paris, like leaving Harlem for Red Hook). He was newly in love; in moving he had quit an eight-year relationship for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called "Ma Jolie." Something is happening when you dump your old girlfriend, move your studio to the other end of town, leave behind the weight of an old project and launch into something completely new.

In a photograph, we see Picasso's new studio at 242 Boulevard Raspail. Drawings and a paperboard sculpture of a guitar hang above a bed covered with cut newspaper scraps. A turned-over African mask in one corner is an artifact from his recent fascination with primitive art. If it took 16 sketchbooks to plan the Demoiselles, and if that large painting was still sitting in this studio unsold, here Picasso is working more quickly and with more transitory materials: cardboard, newspaper, scissors, charcoal. It must have felt liberating. It is exhilarating to see.

The drawings pull you into their logic. At the exhibition, I saw a man and his daughter playing a game of trying to decipher which parts of the guitar were represented by which line, strip of newsprint or collaged wallpaper square. Picasso has his fantastical moments, too. Some lines and shapes are never going to match up with anything but the gleeful desire to make a mark. Watch for the flipping of the newspaper sheet in Violin (Dec. 3, 1912, or later), where a cut newspaper square cartwheels in space simply to rhyme itself. These are giddy visual puns, three-dimensional games--in Violin (1912), a sketched button, shaded as if it were casting a shadow, tacks a taut drawn violin string up to a bare paper wall. By the time I got to Musical Score and Guitar (1912), I laughed out loud at the real straight pin holding a scrap of paper to the picture.

As is often the case upon first learning a language, the vocabulary is deliberately restricted and what is really under investigation is syntax. His building blocks are fake wood, fake marble, newspaper, wallpaper, paperboard, cardboard, charcoal, ink and sheet metal, things that are either utterly evident or exist to trouble the line between real and illusion. In the drawings, Picasso's charcoal lines are breathing, syncopated, not executed mechanically in a single stroke but segmented and rhythmic. The support is often raw canvas or paper.

There is something to seeing these yellowed, nearly hundred-year-old newspaper cutouts. A newspaper is an inherently unstable, fast-aging medium. The idea that a newspaper sheet like this page could be not tomorrow's trash, but art--that was new. Suddenly the world was not just art's subject, but also its stuff. Incorporating grit, newspaper and show tunes on a flat surface--this went beyond painting modern life. (If newspapers die, we may have a different relationship to these Picassos. Maybe it's worth seeing them while we still remember what they feel like and how they work.)

The paintings aren't the Cubist oils he had begun making with Georges Braque, those slightly scaly, coppery, silvery monochromes with the gridded and tilted planes. Here, paintings are colorful pink and green, just as the paper collages are patterned with decorative wallpaper, and the drawings sparse but sly. This is synthetic (rather than analytic) Cubism, but most of all it is fun, the way language can be fun if you take apart words or sentences and put them back together.

By late 1913, the works aren't as exhilaratingly inventive, but they are more beautiful, calm. Bar Table with Guitar (1913) is held together with many pins, drawing as dressmaking. Picasso brings in new kinds of surfaces, like glitter. If the start of the show is the paperboard-and-string Still Life with Guitar, provisional, awkward (and newly reassembled with a recently identified missing piece), the end is the 1914 sheet metal sculpture Guitar, materially more confident but a less exuberant copy of the first. The books will tell you: This was the invention of collage. The guitars have transformed representational painting. The best ones are still in the present tense, however--that's the magic. A sequence of works like this shows that if there is an origin to any universe, it's in the most ordinary stuff: in newspapers and music-hall tunes, in wine, in wallpaper and in a couple years of confident, focused work.

editorial@observer.com

While most museums, including the New Museum, the Guggenheim and the Whitney, consider live music an integral part of their overall program, MoMA insists their PopRally performance series and Warm-Up parties at MoMA P.S.1 are "non-curatorial" and just a way to get people inside. Despite the suggested implication of media and performance at PopRally events, all of which are done in conjunction with an exhibition, these shows are meant to be "accessible programming organized by junior staff at the museum," according to a museum spokesperson.

"The museums are trying to be cool," Seva Granik, who supported the Warm-Up team as stage and bookings manager, put it more bluntly. "That's all it is. And everyone's so happy. Bands think: 'Oh my God, I need to play in a museum.' It obviously adds to the aura of the artist in most people's eyes. And then agents can say, 'Hey, this guy played MoMA! Or the Whitney or whatever. We don't want the $2,000 you're offering, but $4,000.' It's a never-ending circle jerk of these institutions. But it works."

"The idea is that contemporary art is a conversation that artists are having," said Ethan Swan, the programmer of the Get Weird music series at the New Museum, "and musicians are certainly participating in that. We'd be wrong not to recognize new music being made right now as part of this conversation."

Like PopRally, Get Weird emphasizes connections between musical performances and current exhibitions. But at the New Museum, some of the musicians have work in the galleries. The "Younger than Jesus" show at the New Museum in 2009 featured live music by the band Men, who refer to themselves as an "art/performance collective," though you can still catch them at Bowery Ballroom next week. Emily Roysdon, an instrumentalist and songwriter in the collective, displayed her photography in "Younger than Jesus." The group played inside a 40-foot-by-30-foot house that they built out of scrims of paper, based on a series of Ms. Roysdon's photos. "We're absolutely not looking to be just another venue for live music in downtown New York. That's a hole that doesn't need to be filled. But we do feel that live music is part of the discussion in contemporary practice, and we are trying to enhance that." Apparently, the phrase "band practice" is due to take on a whole new meaning.

Even if the introduction of contemporary music into a museum is nothing more than a grasping for credibility, the spaces themselves carry a heavy context. Playing in a building that has the splattered canvases of Jackson Pollock hanging on the walls is now a rite of passage in the evolution of a band, like the first sold-out show or an invitation to the side stage at Pitchfork Music Festival.

"It legitimizes what we do to be recognized by an institution," said Anna Barie, who has played at the Whitney and P.S.1 with her band These Are Powers. "It's like the equivalent of getting an honorary degree from the New York art world."

Of course, the presence of live music in museums is nothing new. In 1943, John Cage played his first New York City concert in a MoMA auditorium. The Whitney has been hosting concerts for bands since the 1960s. Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk were regulars in MoMA's sculpture garden, in the "Jazz Profiles" and "Summergarden" series. Mr. Rollins even recorded an album there, his rambling, associative, sometimes brilliant Solo Album from 1985. But the last generation of hip musical artists (or artistic musicians)--the so-called New Wave, including Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, John Zorn and others--played in New York's vibrant gallery scene in the '80s and into the '90s. Music in museums was distinct from the art, ghettoized and cordoned off from the precious treasures of the collection.

Like their New Wave forebears, the bands playing museums now share a unified aesthetic: atmospheric songs with a loose structure, and frequent use of samples or dissonance or both. They stress the multimedia aspect of their acts so that they can call a museum performance an "installation" rather than a "concert." When Animal Collective took over the rotunda of the Guggenheim last winter with its Transverse Temporal Gyrus installation, the performance was essentially song-free, and many fans expecting a concert vacated after slamming down the free absinthe. These Are Powers' show at the Whitney included an interpretive dance troupe from Providence called Jazz Hand Job. For the band Javelin's Whitney date, the sample-heavy duo built stacks of vintage boom boxes, painted in swirling psychedelic colors, like massive sculptures that became, briefly, a part of the collection.

"There's something hanging over these museum shows that maybe something more is going on than just having a good time," said Tom Van Buskirk, one of Javelin's members. "Playing in a museum offers a suggestion that this is performance art."

Javelin also played MoMA and brought with them an all-girl dance troupe named Anarchy in Motion, who stumbled around out of synch while Mr. Van Buskirk shouted, "Go shorties!" into a microphone. That performance didn't quite make it into the collection, as it were.

Even some who have spearheaded the museum-music movement think a concert in a museum is exactly that--a concert and nothing else. Ronen Givony, the founder of the Wordless Music series, has brought bands like No Age into the New Museum with the aim of exposing the connections between electronic music, indie rock and classical traditions. These concerts tear down certain genre distinctions within contemporary music, Mr. Givony says, but the dismantling stops there.

"Whether it's a string quartet or a rock band, it's a concert," Mr. Givony said. "I think it is interesting that these concerts are happening more often, and I know that bands like to play at museums, but to me, performance art is very particular and well defined, and indie rock is its own thing. It's important not to confuse the two."

Most bands on the museum circuit would argue otherwise. They want to be known not as rock stars but as artists--a moniker MoMA, for one, would deny them. High Places, an electronic duo from Los Angeles (via Brooklyn) has played the New Museum, the Whitney and the Guggenheim. Instrumentalist Rob Barber was teaching art at Pratt when he first teamed with singer Mary Pearson. Their intentions were more artistic than musical, a synthesis of visual art, recording and performance.

"We started High Places not thinking we were a band, but an art installation," said Mary Pearson, the group's singer. "It always takes on different forms depending on where we're playing. It's a kind of performance art, the spectacle of two people coming together to make something."

In a museum, Ms. Pearson says, High Places is freed from the vicissitudes of a rock club, the uninterested drunks getting loaded at the bar, the catcalls to "play your older songs!" and other u
npleasantness. In 2008, High Places, along with No Age, helped inaugurate the opening of the NYPD's least favorite illegal music venue, Market Hotel. Three weeks later, when the band was set to play there again, the cops raided the venue for the first of many times for noise complaints and selling booze without a license. Maybe bands are right to pine for the sacred temple of a museum.

"I don't think," Ms. Pearson said, "anyone's too shocked by what they see in a museum these days."

mmiller@observer.com