Read the whole interview here.

Johnson spoke with CNN about R. Crumb, tripping on the steps of the New Hampshire capitol, and why the term “psychedelic” tends to turn off people in both mainstream and high art circles. Read full article.

Johnson gives a lecture on this thought-provoking topic along with a vibrant, full-color slideshow of images from his book, spanning the work of dozens of artists. Artists Deborah Kass and Chris Martin join Ken Johnson in discussing the role that psychedelic culture plays in their work and in the work of their peers. Full event info.

“For a long time, drugs have been played a role in the social life of the art world. Charles Baudelaire wrote about them. If you do not possess a Delacroix, he said, the next best thing is to be high. But he was opposed to drug use, a weak person’s way of achieving aesthetic experience.” Read full article.

Horizons is a conference about psychedelics that is held annually in New York City. Its goal is to open a fresh dialogue on their role in medicine, culture, history, spirituality, and creativity. Link to site.

Candidly and in personal terms, Ken Johnson addresses the role that psychotropic drugs historically played in modern American culture. He describes how mind-altering substances opened up ways in which viewers of art could move beyond cognition and aesthetic experience to engage with art on through direct experience. Link to full article.

Welcome to Ken Johnson’s Are You Experienced?: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art.

If you’d like to purchase the book, please click here.

Many years ago, I used to puzzle over certain kinds of art that seemed boring to me — Minimalist sculpture, for example—types of art that seemed to offer very little by way of aesthetic or imaginative excitement. At first I assumed it was just a matter of taste; I just had the wrong palette. Then I began to think, what state of mind would I have to be in to enjoy those types of art? What if, for example, I were stoned?

All kinds of things look better and more interesting to the stoned observer, but many kinds of art produced in the 1960s seemed to require not just a new sort of taste but a heightened, maybe Zen-like state of attentiveness, a kind of receptivity to subtleties of space and time and forms and materials that could readily be achieved by smoking weed or ingesting a psychedelic drug.

Joe Brainard, If Nancy Was an Acid Freak, 1972. Mixed media.
7 ¾ x 6 in. (19.7 x 15.2 cm). Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. © The estate of Joe Brainard; courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

“If you remember the ’60s,” the old joke goes, “you weren’t there.” Ken Johnson, today a widely respected art critic for the New York Times, was not only present but—despite inhaling and taking a few acid trips—still recalls everything clearly. Now he’s finally ready to talk.

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In “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) we look out rather than in, but the piercing loneliness is just as palpable. The raking sun is hard and cold. The windows of the buildings are implacably dark. Painted with a dry, slightly brushy touch, it is a scene of aching solitude, although relieved by the transcendental light. Read full article.