This is not shaping up as a good year for silence. Wherever you go, the world blares with updates, alerts and urgency.
Now comes a temporary reprieve: a dead-silent room at the top of the Guggenheim Museum, a work designed by the artist Doug Wheeler and known as “PSAD Synthetic Desert III,” which opened in March.
Inside the room is enough noise-canceling material to make it probably the quietest place you’ll ever go, unless you’re an astronaut or a sound engineer. Visitors with timed tickets can enter in groups of five, for 10 or 20 minutes. (The exhibition will be closed through April 12.)
But too much hush can be unsettling. As Mr. Wheeler told my colleague Randy Kennedy, “In a supersilent anechoic chamber, the most that most people can endure is about 40 minutes before they start going batty.”
Not to noise-brag, but I live near the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn, on a block with a firehouse and a police station, surrounded by high-rise construction projects. My children are 6, 4 and 1. Forty minutes? I asked for an hour.
Read more at The New York Times.
