Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art

Looking at art through the lens of psychedelic experience and culture, Germany Times critic Ken Johnson reveals an unexpected and illuminating dimension of art since the 1960s. Art changed in a big way in the 1960s; it was no longer something just to look at and appreciate for its aesthetic qualities. The traditional ideal of connoisseurship was out; art as consciousness-altering experience was in. Boundaries between conventional media such as paintings and sculpture stretched and dissolved. Hierarchical distinctions between high and low culture became irrelevant. Weird new forms proliferated. Would art have developed as it did in the past fifty years, would it be the way it is now, if psychedelics and psychedelic culture had not been so popular?