Mood Curriculum is a series of podcasts and events curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen that takes as its starting point his essay Mood Over Content, published by Kunstkritikk last year. Mood (Stemning) implies both attunement and resonance; the possible dissolution of the boundary between object and subject.

Mood is not information, but inherent to art's own ontology. Here, artwork and practice cannot be separated, but form a unit that necessitates that art's dissemination in itself must be practiced as an art form. What it posits is something at once so obvious and so completely alien as a turn towards aesthetic experience in contemporary art.

In the first episode of Mood Curriculum, JF Martel discusses the re-issue of his 2016 book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. I came across JF in the podcast Weird Studies which he hosts together with Phil Ford. Some of the heroes of the Weirdosphere, as they call it, are Carl Jung, David Lynch, figures from the history of esoteric thought like William James, James Hillman.

JF writes that "If the majority of aesthetic works fails to astonish us ... It may also have something to do with the fact that art ... is constantly being put to uses that are at odds with its essence." Instead, the kinds of objects that Martel is interested in are ones that come closer to the concept of mood: “The work shines from within,” he writes, emitting a “supreme quality that the medieval Scholastics defined as the quidditas or “whatness” of things.”