Author: Sergei Markelov

Following the statement made by John Berger in his video, as well as in his work Ways of Seeing, I picked the pretty mainstream artwork, though I made this decision after I took the photo of the masterpiece. It was a line of people trying not only to take a picture of this small piece, but also to capture themselves with the original work, as usual in a museum. As soon I aimed my phone and got the photo of the Persistence of Memory, I realized how the intentional meaning of this work by Salvador Dali shifted by connecting with other layers of meaning: a girl is posing (on the right side of the photo), and at the same time the guy with his phone is trying to capture them (on the left).

At that moment, I realized how, actually doesn’t matter for people in this line the artistic value of this picture compared to the hype it has. And every next person was trying to make either a selfie, or capture someone with the picture, or just capture the picture as if they also came to make a college assignment.

I saw this picture previously, though more as an element of Dali’s famous collaboration with Disney called Destino. This surrealist animation was something connecting two narratives: a pop-culture element with Disney cartoons and art, before I even watched some of the great works in museums. And with all these kinds of works, seeing them in real life, we are fading, trying to capture their significance.

I remember the woman crying in the Louvre in a crowd embracing the Mona Lisa; she whispered, barely staying on her feet: Oh God, I dreamt about this moment for all my life. I think I captured that moment with much more clarity and favour than this small DaVinci’s masterpiece, barely seen under the thick layer of bulletproof glass with all those people around.

I think this is kind of a similarity I got when I faced the line of people with smartphones capturing this little work by Salvador Dali one by one, and the next, and another one again.

It would not be a surprise if I say that the vibe of this painting was moving away from me as I found it in different books, or reproductions in a gift store, and towards the full breakup in a bookmark captured just a piece of the painting.

However, I keep thinking about the meaning. There was a doll, a Barbie in a dress made with another famous picture by Van Gogh at a gift shop. Two significant representations of the mass products connected together, like Disney+Dali. And I imagined if someone put this doll on the fifth floor in MoMA, on a stand, with a sign that it was a Marcel Duchamp work, and I would have a chance to stop by without a crowd – what would be the effect?

The knowledge that we are in a museum, the understanding that we are observing the painting collection of significant artists, the explanation notes near these pictures, the inspired and spiritual faces of the audience around making up our impression of the works we are observing. And at the end of the exposition, we are feeling like these kids.

However, to have a chance for reflection, it needs to be prepared for considering art, to be able to read it by applying previous experiences of watching, even though some of the exhibited works are arguably subjective. It is a language we are probably getting less and less able to understand, and in such a museums era we prefer the philistinism way of art: picking up souvenirs in a gift shop rather to explore these narratives? I know that the picture in a gift shop is just a print of the famous painting, but this painting can be turned to the masterpiece if someone would have a chance to sell the vibe of this print – we get the art. At the end of the day, for me the result is that the art is a unique piece of artistic view rather than a mass product, though even a piece of art can be the mainstream if the line of people is lining up to take a picture of their appearance near the art.

If to consider the photography as an art medium between the empirical world and captured representation of reality as a existential essence of the photography, as a trace, a captured moment in a time and space as it was considered by Roland Bard in his work Camera Lucida, beyond from the consumerist agenda of current foreseen by Susan Sontag in her On Photography work, those pictures had have captured by Alice Austen was, keeping in mind her queer perspective was both the way to reconsider the narratives being actual for her period of time by shifting the perspective of how her society applied to the daily values, and at the same time, also the way to capture the time, to safe some very important, intimate, gentle moments of the queer life created by ad hoc The Darned Society.

That same perspective I was trying to apply to the picture I took at Alice Austin’s House, trying to connect both the intimacy of the Larky Life still in the air in this place, and capturing the moment of House dailies. There weren’t a try to revise the current notion as it is no longer a necessary at least in such a community, however, I like the juxtaposition of the senses in the picture I took with both touch of something impressionistic and old, when that community took a place, and with the new inclination like the thick line of Verazzano Bridge symbolised of the passed time as it was builded up much later. This is actually what might simultaneously being included in a photo as a unique medium if to considering this elusive narrative juxtaposition in the picture, the juxtaposition of even controversial meanings with the same time literally the capturing the reflection of light on a silver halide crystals I assume still being a part of the Polaroid film chemical structure which is itself unique, as it was same uniqueness of the picture of Roland Bard’s mother being a little girl he found and turned it to the Camera Lucida work. With such a narrative in mind, I took this picture when I’d obtained a few free moments with Polaroid at this cozy Austin’s House water edge follow a significant shape to the modern Manhattan.

I’ve been to Ermitage and seen El Greco, I’ve seen Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca in a Pushkin Museum, I’ve seen Mona Lisa in a Louvre, Munk’s The Scream in a Munk Museum, Rotko in the Museum of Art in DC, I am still wish to visit the Venece where the Tintoretto was working and Florence famous from being a lullaby of DaVinci and Buonarroti. But what might I get from the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Raphael again, why not?

But first it was a hall of butts, many-many ancient Greek and Roman butts (I wonder who decided to position them in such a manner) with the most powerful Hercules’s.

I am not a big fan of ancient sculpture, though, and moved directly to the painting area. There are, of course, more than enough significant paintings, but first I was admitted and first touched me was not even Virgil’s Tomb by Moonlight, with Silius Italicus Declaiming, 1779 by Joseph Wright, but the kid, about 10 years old, with utter devotion drawing this picture. It is the most amusing to watch how the art applies to people’s emotions, especially if it is a child’s mind. God knows why this little boy was so affected by this painting with an ancient poet’s tomb, and if he even knows who that guy is who accidentally got reincarnated in a Divided Comedy.

I am also aimed to the French art, Impressionism, though I like this sense of simplicity. Shoes by Vincent van Gogh was this type of art hiding some mystery beneath. They say, Van Gogh “painted several still lifes of shoes or boots during his Paris period” and this picture, “painted later, in Arles, evinces a unique return to the earlier motif” but mow being placed in within a specific spatial context: namely, the red-tile floor of the Yellow House”. Shoes “may have been those of Patience Escalier, whose portrait Van Gogh executed around the same time, late summer 1888”. I like such types of stories beyond the picture itself, and its simple big sense makes me remember it.

And the third, and actually the main pleasure, was again Raphael with exclusive exhibition-tour Sublime Poetry as a view on his career, with unique “drawings, paintings, prints, and tapestries on view present a portrait of his dashing artistic personality and astonishingly creative mind”. It is significantly attributed to how future masterpieces are basically developing through the sketches as a film photo, as you can easily recognise these future well-known canvases. It is nonetheless intriguing to observe how this, basically one of the Renaissance establishment’s paintings, had been developing from his contemporaries like Perugino, who were applying the same motives you can find in the exhibition as well, or how his own painting developed to become more dramatic and reach beyond earlier portraits.

With this actual point when I face Raphael’s paintings 10 years after our first meeting, I realized that art is stretched out over time experience which developing simultaneously with you. Same as aiming the simplicity of the complication of Raphael’s works, aiming to the point upfront. My first experience of that was in Moscow, and now it is in New York, which is kind of symbolic though I haven’t decided why yet.