'nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed'

With a few hours to kill in Montreal before a Return to Forever concert (about which more later), I stopped in to the Musee d'Art Contemporain to see the exhibit that gives this post its title (it sounds even artier in French).

It's a very cool exhibit, and I wandered around happily, and then spotted three boxes of record albums on the floor. Just boxes of LPs, sitting there, like at a flea market or something. My impulse, of course, is to flip through them, so I do so cautiously because, after all, I'm in a musee. Nice collection: the Mamas and the Papas, Rotary Connection, Sinatra, Little Richard on Specialty, the soundtrack from 'Performance,' The Buckaroos.

But this, it turns out, is not simply albums in crates. This is a work of art. It says so right on the wall. It's a piece by Jon Knowles called "The Robert Smithson Record Collection 2004-2008," "amassing actual records that are laid out like a sculpture." There is also an iPod in a display case, playing music from these LPs (while I'm visiting, it's playing "Jump Monk" by Charles Mingus). The description of the work says there are 105 LPs, part of a "work in progress."

People who accumulate music on vinyl can take heart from this.