Yoko Ono's "Music of the Mind" Is the Interactive Art Experience Los Angeles Needs Right Now
Few artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have so consistently challenged the boundary between creator and audience as Yoko Ono. Now on display at the Broad in Los Angeles, Music of the Mind is a sweeping retrospective that pulls visitors out of the role of passive observer and drops them directly into the center of Ono's singular artistic universe. It is not a show you simply look at. It is a show you feel, touch, write on, and walk through — and that radical invitation is exactly the point.
What Is "Music of the Mind"?
Music of the Mind is the most comprehensive retrospective of Yoko Ono's work ever mounted in the United States. Spanning more than six decades of output, the exhibition gathers her conceptual pieces, instructional works known as "instruction paintings," film, performance documentation, and immersive installations under one roof. The title itself is characteristically Ono: cerebral yet lyrical, merging the intellectual and the sensory in a single breath.
The retrospective originally premiered at Tate Modern in London before traveling to the Broad, cementing its status as one of the most significant art events of the year. For Los Angeles audiences, the timing feels particularly resonant. In a city defined by spectacle, celebrity, and visual culture, Ono's work arrives as a quiet but persistent counterforce — asking not what you see, but what you are willing to do and feel in the presence of art.
The Tradition of Participation: Why Ono's Art Still Feels Ahead of Its Time
Long before "immersive art" became a marketing buzzword, Yoko Ono was building experiences that required the audience to complete the work. In the 1960s, when she was deeply embedded in the Fluxus movement in New York, she began creating instruction-based art: short, poetic texts that prompted the reader to imagine, perform, or construct something in their own mind or body. These pieces, which she called "instruction paintings," treated the human imagination as a valid and powerful artistic medium.
Works like Grapefruit — her 1964 artist's book of instructions — invited readers to "listen to the sound of the earth turning" or "imagine the clouds dripping." These were not whimsical prompts. They were carefully constructed invitations to reclaim attention in a world growing noisier and more fragmented by the decade. Decades later, in the age of smartphones and algorithmic content feeds, the instructions feel less like art history and more like urgent advice.
At the Broad, these traditions are brought to life in physical form. Visitors can add their own wishes to Ono's famous Wish Tree, writing personal hopes on small tags and tying them to the branches of a living tree. They can chip away at a block of white stone in Mend Piece, then use glue and thread to repair the fragments — a meditation on damage, healing, and collective responsibility. Each interaction adds to the work, meaning the exhibition is literally different on the day you visit than it was the day before.
Key Works on Display at the Broad
While every visitor will have their own moment of connection with the exhibition, several pieces stand out as centerpieces of Music of the Mind.
Ceiling Painting / Yes Painting (1966)
Perhaps the most famous work in the show, this piece asks viewers to climb a ladder and peer through a magnifying glass at a tiny word printed on the ceiling: "YES." It was the work that reportedly caught John Lennon's attention when he visited Ono's show at the Indica Gallery in London, and it remains a quietly radical object — an artwork built around affirmation at a time when so much of conceptual art leaned toward negation and alienation.
War Is Over! (If You Want It)
Originally launched as a billboard campaign in 1969, this piece has since become one of Ono's most enduring statements. Its conditional framing — peace as a choice, not a given — remains as politically pointed today as it was during the Vietnam War era. Seeing it in the context of a full retrospective allows viewers to understand it not as a slogan but as a coherent philosophical position that runs through all of her work.
Cut Piece (1964)
Documented through archival film and photography, Cut Piece is one of the most challenging and important performance works of the twentieth century. In it, Ono sat on a stage and invited audience members to cut away pieces of her clothing with scissors. The work confronted vulnerability, gender, power, and consent decades before those conversations entered mainstream cultural discourse.
Yoko Ono Beyond John Lennon: Reclaiming the Full Picture
One of the most important things a retrospective of this scale accomplishes is contextual correction. For much of her public life, Ono has been filtered through the lens of her marriage to John Lennon — a framing that has often diminished and distorted her independent artistic identity. Music of the Mind makes a compelling and overdue case that Ono was already a groundbreaking conceptual artist before she met Lennon, and that her work has continued to evolve and matter in the decades since his death.
The exhibition traces her roots in postwar Tokyo, her studies at Sarah Lawrence College, her involvement in the downtown New York avant-garde scene, and her ongoing global peace activism. It is a full portrait, and it is long overdue.
Planning Your Visit to the Broad
The Broad is located in downtown Los Angeles on Grand Avenue, placing it at the heart of the city's expanding arts district alongside the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Tickets for Music of the Mind are available through the Broad's official website, and timed entry reservations are strongly recommended given the level of public interest the show has generated.
The exhibition is suitable for visitors of all ages, and its participatory nature makes it an especially engaging experience for younger audiences who may be encountering Ono's work for the first time. Docent-led tours and programming events are scheduled throughout the run, offering deeper context for those who want to go beyond the gallery floor.
Why "Music of the Mind" Matters in 2024
At a moment when the art world is asking hard questions about what museums are for and who they serve, Music of the Mind offers a quietly radical answer: art should require something of you. It should not be a passive luxury or a content experience optimized for social media sharing. It should unsettle, invite, and occasionally discomfort. Yoko Ono has been saying this for sixty years. The Broad is now saying it to Los Angeles, and the city would do well to listen.
Whether you arrive as a longtime admirer of Ono's work or as someone encountering her ideas for the first time, Music of the Mind is likely to leave a mark. Not the kind you photograph and post. The kind you carry quietly for a long time afterward.