Fate plays out in a strange way – it takes me to one unexpected place and then another. And now I find myself in a very unusual apartment on the sublet, where an artist and a scientist lives. We met by chance a couple days before our last move. He went to Europe on business, and left the apartment in our care, along with flowers and books. You can tell a person’s hobbies and interests from his library, and literally every book here is something interesting.
Books on the philosophy of art pose the main question – what do artists paint and probably why? Is it as a photocopy of reality to replace current social media or is it a depiction of artists’ fantasies of an ideal that is not attainable in life? No one will give us an answer, just as no one will tell us exactly why we live and what the meaning of everything is. There are concepts, ideas, assumptions. And in the end, let us decide and choose for ourselves.
I look at paintings by artists of antiquity as a history of that time. For me it is analogous to a photo album of those times, when there was no mass photography yet. Looking at the costumes, the dogs, the food on the table. I wonder how much of it is all embellished by the filters of brush and paint. Were those dresses really so lush and the curls so smooth? And everyone was painting themselves, even if they were painting others.
It seems to me that the only moment in the history of mankind, when we can really imagine what and how it was by photo – is the nineties, when everyone took photos on photographic film and Photoshop and simple image processing had not yet appeared. We pressed a button and we don’t know what was photographed there. Then a month later you develop it and you’ll be horrified. But you can still put it in your album as a keepsake. Reading this book, I felt surprisingly old…
As if I have lived not 37 easygoing years, but several eternities, for which were born and disappeared all that at first seemed unreal, and then – that now will always be. Twitter, for example. Have you realized that Twitter is over? There’s some kind of X. I don’t know, I haven’t used Twitter in ages. But it’s one thing to not use something, and another thing to experience the transformation of reality around you once again.
Art. How can it capture our days if the only thing that’s really memorable is a banana taped to the wall?
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