Techniques: Luminal Music

Some day all art must come to light. —Matisse

Along with everything else, art has gone electric. It was bound to come in an age when light bulbs turn winter into spring in the greenhouses, when man's best-hidden viscera are laid bare and shining beneath the surgeon's spotlights, when murders have been witnessed on the television screen, and when the newest mind-expanding drug, in the words of one user, "makes your body feel like a conductor for tens of thousands of volts."

From coast to coast, no major exhibit of contemporary art these...