‘I remember going to art school and no one could dance,’ artist Mark Leckey tells me over Zoom, smiling, recalling his own cohort coming up just as house music and early raves took off in the 1980s. ‘There’s a different demographic in the art world now,’ he says. ‘More connected to clubbing and that whole culture.’ We are speaking a week before Zurich’s Street Parade, the world’s largest techno street party, where a million people move through the city behind 30 sound-system trucks. As art institutions including Hamburger Bahnhof and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, MoMA PS1 in New York, and the Tate in London increasingly incorporate DJs into their programming, the question is: What has prompted the shift?

One hundred years of shared real estate

Art and music have long rubbed shoulders, usually because they were forced to share cheap real estate. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings started Dada from Cabaret Voltaire, a small room in a Zurich tavern in 1916, treating experimental sound, poetry, noise, and dance as one continuous nightly event rather than separate disciplines, maybe a prototype for every art-meets-nightlife collision since. Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which was staged in a New York nightclub in 1966, was arguably the first club night built explicitly as an artwork (that same year, Warhol became the manager of the seminal avant-garde rock band The Velvet Underground). In downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s, abandoned warehouses and derelict tenements were inexpensive enough for painters, sculptors, and musicians to practice and party in the same blocks. There, an art-school-to-band pipeline forged acts like Talking Heads, while visual artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat (who had a band, Gray) combined the disciplines in their artistic practices. The new development is narrower – DJs recognized as artists in their own right, commissioned and credited, from major museums to South London basements.

DJing has its roots in Jamaican sound-system culture and the Queer, countercultural dance floors of late-1960s and early-1970s New York. The idea of the DJ as the party’s centerpiece, elevated above the partygoers both physically and figuratively, is a relatively new phenomenon – in David Mancuso’s The Loft, the DJ console was hidden to enhance the dance floor’s communal experience. Rave and hardcore music in the UK, as captured in Leckey’s video work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), and its afterlife in jungle and UK garage, saw the transatlantic collision of Chicago acid house and the Jamaican diaspora’s sound-system culture explode into a mass movement of subversive collectivity, one so large that the UK restricted gatherings around ‘music characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.’ In the 1990s, the DJ moved from the illegal or semi-legal rave to the club. Superclubs emerged, positioning the DJ as the draw rather than background music, a name on the flyer that people would travel for.

Now, a DJ can be a star artist, so to speak, but also a curator: A DJ reads a room, a history, a context, and assembles it into something coherent in real time, with the same fluency an institution already prizes in its own curators. ‘It’s all about good curation,’ says James Massiah, the South London poet, DJ, and founder of reading night ‘Adult Entertainment’. ‘A good curator will set the right context and connect the dots. Holding a viewer’s hand to lead them to the spot where they can draw their own conclusions without being spoon-fed.’

Generations of crossover

If the DJ is newly legible to institutions as an artist or curator, the visual artist who DJs has been legible for decades. Wolfgang Tillmans has often performed as a DJ; his photographs turned the tenderness of club culture into some of the most consequential photography of the 1990s. Juliana Huxtable’s Queer, political visual work and writing segued into DJing, but her mediums read as facets of one practice rather than separate careers. Leckey went to art school ‘not to become an artist but to join a band,’ and has spent decades since explicitly trying to ‘align two poles’ within himself: the institution he had been inculcated into, and the sound-system culture that actually felt like his. This alignment runs through works such as his 2003 Tate Britain piece BigBoxStatueAction that placed a sound system into dialogue with a Jacob Epstein sculpture.

Some careers are making the opposite journey, from rave to art institution. Oda Haliti spent 15 years building a DJ career in the Balkan club scene, running her own bar and booking nights in Kosovo from 2010, working across NGOs, human rights festivals, and protest culture as much as nightlife. Her work is now being folded into art contexts, such as Hamburger Bahnhof’s Berlin Beats rave series and the 18th Lyon Biennale this September. Asked whether she experiences club and gallery as different disciplines, she rejects the premise: ‘I don’t necessarily see myself as entering the art world. I think I’m bringing a practice that has always existed between different spaces.’

The economics behind the intersection

That still leaves the institutional side of the question. Dr. Matt Williams ran a decade of genre-defining music programming at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, including Venezuelan artist Arca’s first London gig and a run of grime nights. He describes how the art venue needed to shift its narrow, class-coded appearance and widen its audience and relevance. ‘Investment in music is important because I’m a believer that arts centers, as public spaces, have a civic responsibility,’ he tells me. ‘If reaching audiences means shifting direction […], then you have to push, shape, and think about how you best use public money to engage people, and hopefully not just preach to the converted, but actually stimulate growth and engagement.’ Public arts funding across Europe has been cut hard and repeatedly, but a DJ-curated evening is an efficient way to get crowds through the door.

Leckey locates similar pressure from the music side: ‘Both the art world and the music world are alienating in their own ways – through gallery closures and market pressures in art, and through streaming and Spotification dissolving potential income in music. There’s an economic drive behind [the art-music crossover], but also a recognition between the two that offers a space with real potential.’ Neither field can sustain a creative life on its own anymore, so people are finding whatever rooms will still have them. Haliti says clubs are closing in New York, London, and Berlin for different reasons, ‘from the pandemic and economic pressures to generational shifts and changing nightlife habits.’ Against that backdrop, an institution putting resources behind DJing reads less like extraction and more like one of the few well-funded rooms willing to keep the culture alive. ‘There are people who want to exploit and tap in,’ says Massiah, ‘but […] most of my experiences of the art world and club world crossover have been eye-opening, decent, and wonderful.’

Institutions from Kiasma to Bergen Kunsthall, KANAL to Lafayette Anticipations are increasingly designing themselves around live performance, treating sound and gathering as core architecture. But the more telling movement is still happening from underneath. In South London, pockets like Ormside Projects and Spanners have been building nights around experimental sound and art together for some time. People increasingly see DJing not as adjacent to artistic practice but as an extension of it, with the same authorship and claim to legitimacy running through a mixer as through a paintbrush. Whether that is happening in a London basement, a Berlin museum garden, or a Zurich techno festival, the intention – to gather people and let them connect through music – has not changed. Now get up and dance.