TERESA GRZYBKOWSKA

ART AND DAILY LIFE

Contents of Article: Introduction, Art and Rationality, Art and Revolt, Art and Technology, Art and Physiology, Art and violence, Art and Death, Conclusion.

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

Pablo Picasso

    Almost all great discoveries significant to the everyday life of man are accompanied by artists. The glass, invented by Phoenicians and later refined in Venice, was used to produce practical items, bottles, goblets, glasses, but also beautiful colourful vessels, windowpanes and marvellous stained glass. Finally, the electrical light was closed in a ball-shaped glass. The light bulb substituted the sun, lightening the darkness of the night, and it continues to do so even today.

   Leonardo da Vinci, the divine painter active at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, but first of all, a great designer and inventor, drew a prototype of a bicycle, tank, submarine, flying machine. Cars, planes, armoured vehicles and the bicycle were conceived from those ideas, the last of which still remains a means of transport the far most connected with man, operated only by the power of his muscles.

   In the 17th century, especially in the Netherlands, the camera obscura became commonly used in the painters’ ateliers. Thanks to this instrument, there appeared other devices from which photographic and movie cameras, cinema and finally television were created. It is the media that shape in the strongest way the reality of everyday life in the 20th and 21st century, in nearly all the fields, especially fashion, tradition, artistic taste and cuisine.

   Da Vinci’s idea of the flying machine was realized on the eve of the modern era. In 1909 Louis Bléroit flew over the English Channel. In 1927 Charles Lindbergh made his lonely flight over the Atlantic from New York to Paris in a small plane called “The Spirit of Saint Louis”. Today it stands in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and moves the visitors deeply. Above all, it was a feat of insane bravery, the more that the pilot in the little plane had restricted vision. The same museum holds the space shuttle in which the first people reached the Moon in July 1969. In this way, Americans fulfilled the dream of Daedalus, an ancient artist and inventor. On account of the flight to the Moon, they invented the mobile phone which allowed the communication between astronauts.

   The plane, Internet and mobile phone have fundamentally changed people’s everyday lives. They have allowed the covering of distances as well as information transfer at speeds unimaginable before. This includes information connected with artistic activity. Not many people can function without a mobile phone today. This device allows communication over a regime – in the woman’s hand, it has lately become a symbol of revolutionary changes in Iran and her image has been spread in world-wide newspapers.

   All these innovations in our lives have been made possible to a large extent thanks to modernism. The artists of this current did not see any obstacles either in the way of thinking or acting. What became essential was the unceasing provocation and crossing of all the barriers. The beginning of the 20th century brought a revolutionary change in science, politics and art. The artists wanted to face up to the new scientific image of the world enriched by Einstein’s theory of relativity, the discovery of radium by Maria Skłodowska Curie, Freud and Jung’s research penetrating the mystery of the human psyche and finally the bloody experiences of the Russian Revolution from 1905 and 1917. The cubists, expressionists, futurists, dadaists, surrealists have irreversibly changed the world of painting, sculpture, architecture, film, handicraft and fashion.

   In the 1920s Coco Chanel changed the lives of millions of women around the world by imposing her own style. For the first time women started to have short hair, wear short comfortable dresses made from soft fabrics. The fashion of trousers for women was also a revolution. It was already present in the first part of the 19th century when George Sand was shocking the citizens of Paris by wearing trousers instead of long puffed skirts, which made it almost impossible to walk on the streets still covered with mud before the great redevelopment of the city initiated by Haussmann. Chanel, the first woman – fashion creator on a great scale – promoted costume jewellery and wore it herself together with the genuine type. It was she who popularized the fashion for strings of pearls which are now usually limited to one small string worn by women across the globe as the expression of elegance and good taste. Chanel left a mark of her style on the fashion of the whole world until this day, no matter what kind of extravagance has appeared in fashion for the last one hundred years.

   Modernism prevailing from the beginning to almost the middle of the 20th century evolved into a postmodernism phase and an art of the turn of the millenniums called Art Now. The changes that modernism introduced into human mentality were fundamental – beauty and love were rejected in favour of brutal sex and violence. It is enough to recall the prose of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and Heinrich Mann, Alan Berg’s opera “Lulu”. Cinema also played a great part.

   Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s movies “The Golden Age” and “An Andalusian Dog”, which outraged the audience in the 1920s, have become the prototypes of today’s thrillers just like the first horror films about demonic characters: Dr. Caligari, Frankenstein and Dracula. A lot of contemporary cinema works are the heirs of those first horrors. It seems that their culmination is the recent “Antichrist” by Lars van Trier, a film which is a celebration of sex and the fear of death. The artist tried to display a reality which is psychological, invisible, entering a world of the dangerous, terrifying the subconscious. Everything becomes possible in the world of irrational emotions. The shocking relation between the cinema and politics was presented 50 years ago by Siegfried Kracauer, a film theorist and sociologist, in his study “From Caligari to Hitler”. In a brilliant analysis he demonstrated how the gloomy films of Friedrich Murnau and Fritz Lang expressed the fears and obsessions of the contemporary Germans which soon turned into the nightmare of Hitlerism.

   To put it simply, from the ancient times to the second half of the 19th century, artists tried to present the world in the way they perceived it, so they wanted to render as faithfully as possible the beauty and goodness, the perfect anatomy of the human body and the idealized landscapes. The impressionists were the first to abandon on a large scale depicting features and figures in a portrait manner in favour of the play of light, general impression. They created a leeway for further deformations – fauvistic, expressionistic, futuristic, cubistic, dadaistic, surrealistic as well as others. It seems that the artists’ inventiveness has got no limits when it comes to substituting God. As a result, Immanuel Kant’s conjecture turned out to be false, although art theoreticians often quoted his views. Kant believed that art, unlike science, has its end, a determined boundary which cannot be crossed. According to Kant, art does not develop though it always has some aim. From the perspective of 20th century experiences we can say that thanks to modernistic artists our understanding of the art is changing constantly and it keeps playing newer and newer roles in our lives. But are we still dealing with art or is it a new form of human activity?

   Art is becoming more and more accessible and almost anyone who wants to, can afford a visit in museums or great galleries in Europe and America which once used to be exclusive. But on the other hand the vast majority of employed people in the whole world suffer from the constant lack of free time and from the haste that takes the freedom of thoughts. Even the privileged who perform intellectual professions complain that it is impossible to oppose the overwhelming speed. People walk fast, eat fast, they cannot tolerate waiting and have no time for silence or contemplation. But they have better and better technical equipment which is so attractive that there is no time for loneliness because it is terrifying. The general chaos and confusion make people disorientated, a human being loses the instinct of happiness in favour of casual pleasures. In such a situation, art needs to transmit a quick and easily understandable message or shock in order to stop for a moment a man who is running both physically and spiritually, and who perceives only those phenomena which are simple, which do not cause difficulties in reception and do not require any effort or reflection.

   And it all began so innocently. In 1863 in Paris, a group of painters, in a protest against the official annual “Salon” verdicts, exhibited their paintings in the “Salon des Refusés” (the Salon of the Rejected). Those artists rejected, on principle, the goddesses of classicists, the aristocratic shepherdesses of romantics, the legendary exotic harems, the metaphysical landscapes, the safety of the Biedermeier wealth. Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, each of them in a different way, wanted their painting to present daily life, the lives of ordinary people.

   Courbet created paintings which were almost photographic: “The Stone-Breakers”, “Girls on the Banks of the Seine”, “Sleep”. In the last one there were two nude beautiful women presented sleeping cuddled up to each other. His erotic creed was comprised in a small painting “The Origin of the World”, which up to now is regarded as bold and shocking. In the field of eroticism, Courbet was the herald of changes since strong sex will be one of the main themes of painting, graphics arts and the cinema of the 20th century.

   The topics taken from daily life became the manifesto material for Édouard Manet’s canvases. His pictures, like e.g. “The Absinthe Drinker", “The Lunch on the Grass”, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” were shocking by topics devoid of prudery and by a “rough” style of painting. The impressionists went even further – they blurred the outlines of people and objects in favour of impressions, and above all, light, which became the central figure of their pictures. It was chiefly Claude Monet who painted in this way. His “Water Lilies” can delight even today with their almost abstract expression.

   The artists used topics literally taken from the street. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was the one who went the furthest then with the consistent depiction of the life of prostitutes, individuals that were despised by the bourgeois society the most. In his art, he conveyed the heartbreaking view of their tragic lives. This theme will enter the world of art for good. The artist’s choice can be interpreted as one of the first signs of feminism. Earlier, in “The Lunch on the Grass”, Manet showed the naked Victorine Meurent next to two fully clothed men, the artist’s brother Gustave and his friend. In reference books this woman was considered as a prostitute, but in fact she was a professional model, painter and intellectual friend of Manet. She also posed for his paintings “Olympia” and “The Street Singer”.

   Eunice Lipton also devoted a book published in 1992 to this unusual woman. She proved in this book that Manet’s “Lunch on the Grass” from 1863 is actually a feminist work. In the picture, we can see a naked, independent woman sitting next to two attired men. The confident look of the model cools down the men’s desire, her figure introduces a sense of unease as it shatters the stereotype of passive femininity. She does not fraternize with the viewer, her sexuality belongs only to herself. It is curious how the English Suffragette, who in 1914 cut Velázquez’s „Venus” with a knife in the London National Gallery, finding the picture offending to woman’s dignity, would react to “The Lunch on the Grass”. Would she notice in the model a different attitude towards the men’s world? Velázquez’s model with her back turned to the viewer has an anonymous face of all the loved women of the world reflected in the mirror, while Manet’s model has specific features of a particular woman expressing full approval of her total uncover.

   The next picture which was a significant stage in the manner of everyday thinking about women and which was even a kind of a feminist manifesto was Picasso’s “The Young Ladies of Avignon”, created as a tribute to Toulouse-Lautrec. Picasso made a real revolution in this painting. First of all, he quit ostentatiously in his artistic programme with the Greek-Roman-Renaissance tradition lasting for two and a half thousand years, worshiping the harmonious beauty of the human body. In this picture Picasso put three women and two men – a sailor and a student – the most frequent brothel clients, through a cubistic deformation. For the composition of the scene in the brothel, the artist used the story of “The Judgement of Paris”, popular in ancient paintings, giving a new ironic-persiflage meaning to the myth. The artist substituted goddesses with the girls from the brothel on Avinyo Street in Barcelona. Picasso used to meet them frequently not only at night, as he lived nearby and he bought paints in the shop with painting equipment.

   This picture was so shocking and revolutionary that for a long time nobody dared to show it in public. Although painted in 1907, it was exhibited only after a few years. Picasso’s dramatic cubistic paintings and Matisse’s diametrically different in temperament, bold, sensuous, originally fauvistic colour, changed the way of perceiving the surrounding world. Another turning point in the manner of looking at the tragedy caused by wars was Picasso’s “Guernica”. It turned out then that cubism seemed to have been invented in order to show the ruins of the world, the destruction brought about by violence. On 26 April 1937, after the air raid of the Nazi planes, the Basque city of Guernica changed into a cubistic heap of rubble. In this way, the citizens were punished for their opposition to general Franco’s dictatorship.

   It was already World War I that changed the human relationships diametrically. The German expressionists, with Otto Dix among them, showed the futility of human existence, they reduced it to the physical suffering of the battered, like an animal, body deserving only contempt. Love was substituted by prostitution and a broadly-understood pornography of violence. Futurism, dadaism, surrealism grew on the grounds of protests against the existing course of events. The artists wanted to destroy all that was positive, thus, not only love but also museums, which were an expression of positive emotions. They wanted to reveal the absurdity of human activities, which are worth not more than a childish word “dada”, in French meaning a small wooden horse.

   One of André Warnod’s drawings presents “Venice after the Futurists”. Over La Serenissima we can see hovering zeppelins and smoke from the factory chimneys. It is one of the terrible futuristic visions. Surrealists declared the eliminating of the boundary between what is rational and what is fantastic. They strived to create a better world than the one they found, they wanted to achieve their aim using free associations and the subconscious. In painting, they documented what they saw. This is the reason why photography played a great part in their art. They wanted anarchy in all the fields, they gave up tradition and attacked all the authorities. How far they went with their fantasies is expressed well by the postulate of the author of their manifesto, André Breton: “The simplest surrealist act consists in going into the street with revolvers in your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much as possible. Anyone who has never felt the desire to deal thus with the current wretched principle of humiliation and stultification clearly belongs in this crowd himself with his belly at bullet height”.

   This postulate has been more than fulfilled since these words were written. Everyday we experience in an extremely acute way the signs of terrorism in all its forms. Life, cinema, literature, painting, show-business and even fashion are full of it. The existential, intellectual prank has become a gloomy reality.

   The old world order has literally fallen apart. Artists have faced up to this call for a new reality. Meret Oppenheim wrote in 1936: „Nobody will give you freedom, you have to take it”. In the same year, she created her most famous work “A cup, saucer and spoon covered with fur” named by Breton “Le Déjeuner en fourrure” (Breakfast on Fur) in an ironic opposition to Manet’s famous “Lunch on the Grass”. The surrealists’ approval of this work came from Oppenheim’s complete fulfilment of Breton’s next postulate expressed in his essay “The Crisis of the Object”. The poet called upon to impose a new function to everyday items, to dish the beast of habit, to evoke the feeling of absurdity and astonishment.

   From those times onwards, the artist did not wait for public acclaim but wanted to provoke the spectator, cause an outburst of anger or a storm of laughter. In the case of Oppenheim’s work, what happened became a typical thing for the later fate of art and the artist of the 20th century. The artist alone did not attach much significance to this composition which came into being as a result of a conversation with Picasso in a Paris café, concerning the role of the café as a place of artistic meetings. The cup made of fur was presented at a memorable New York exhibition “Fantastic art, dada and surrealism” in 1936 and was bought by Alfred H. Barr for the Museum of Modern Art. This weird and absurd idea was delightful for some, to others it was outrageous. And that was important. Since that time what increased considerably was the role of merchants and art critics, who at the end of the 20th century became the central figures of “the conspiracy of art” exposed or analyzed so thoroughly by Jean Baudrillard.

   The exhibition named “Dada” organized in 2006 at Centre Pompidou in Paris proved that the absurd, insane ideas of the surrealists and dadaists constituted a strong and durable fuel for artists for long decades. The master of intellectual deconstruction who decided about the face of art for the next decades of the 20th century was Marcel Duchamp. Renaissance art was created mainly by Italians represented by the three geniuses Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. The 20th century belonged to the Spanish and the French, the geniuses of this century were Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp. Picasso and Dalí’s art presented the world with revolutionary forms and unlimited imagination and yet put in a classical form. Dalí was an admirer of Raphael and exact sciences. Both Dalí and Picasso had a lot of followers. But Duchamp left a distinctive impression on the way of thinking not only about art, but about life as well. Nothing is impossible since in 1914 he brought a pissoir, then a bicycle wheel and finally a bottle drainer into the gallery. This toilet bowl brought directly from a shop was called “Fountain” and he announced that only an artist can decide if the given object is a piece of art.

   Duchamp wanted to abandon the myth of an artist as a creator and proved that mass-produced everyday items, “ready-made” objects can be named pieces of art. It was the artist alone who made a decision about what should be a piece of art. Thus Duchamp strengthened, and not weakened, the mythical, demiurgic role of the creator. It was less than a decade later when Kurt Schwitters expressed the omnipotence of an artist in crude words “Everything the artist spits is art”. The consequence of this sentence cannot be overestimated. It has become a manifesto for many. Tomek Kawiak understood the dadaist’s thought literally and sent his spit to exhibitions.

   Almost everything that Duchamp exposed was a provocation. The scandals always linked to dadaists’ activities became for decades the motto of artists who wanted to provoke the viewer, to surprise, bewilder, astonish, outrage, stun with ugliness, disgust, to desecrate and, above all, to show disrespect to the ancient art, especially to the adored pieces of art. Except for the “Fountain”, the second groundbreaking ready-made work which has caused fundamental consequences in the way of thinking about the art, was deriding the masterpiece of the Western culture, the universally admired “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci.

   In 1919 Duchamp painted a moustache and a beard on a colour reproduction of the painting and wrote the mysterious letters L.O.O.Q.. The inscription read in French means “Elle a chaud au cul”, that is she has got a hot ass or she has got a fire between her legs, meaning she is sexually aroused. This vulgar commentary with reference to the hallowed masterwork was shocking at that time. Today, it does not surprise anyone which proves the great success of the dadaistic ideas, the fundamental changes in the culture of everyday thinking, not only about art, but also about the whole world of values. In his programmatic desecration of acknowledged values, Duchamp found a great number of followers from dadaists up until today. It is enough to look even at Polish art – the works of Katarzyna Kozyra and Dorota Nieznalska.

   Paintings, sculptures, art graphics, music, literature are “the pure arts” but architecture and handicraft fulfil mainly the practical functions. The artists who crossed all the former norms in thinking, but also ordinary people deluded by them, wanted to live in different houses than those in which they lived so far. In the whole of Europe, the Młodziaks family from Gombrowicz’s work had the same need for changes, not only mental but also when it came to everyday surroundings. In various countries, houses were built differently, in a modern way but often based on the local tradition.

   The symbols of the new era were American skyscrapers. Those temples of capitalism were built mainly in New York and Chicago with the most famous 230 metres high Woolworth Building which appeared in the landscape of New York in 1913. Skyscrapers, the symbol of American prosperity, were built also in Moscow and other cities under the Soviet reign. That is also the genesis of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science.

   In Germany, the beginnings of modernism were different. Here factories were given monumental forms and became the new “temples of power”. Such factories were built in Berlin with their facades resembling Greek temples just like the one in Paestum.

   While in America they were building skyscrapers, Hans Peltzig constructed in Wrocław in 1913 a huge expressionistic ferroconcrete “Hala Stulecia” (The Hall of the Century) with a gigantic glass dome, the biggest at that time, which was created to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the German victory over Napoleon. This building, just like the great “Theatre of the Five Thousand” built for Max Reinhardt, truly expressed Nietzsche’s “will to power”. It was a space without any division between the stage and the auditorium, egalitarian, all the seats cost the same. Today, it is a great scenography for Wagner’s operas staged there.

   When creating this strongly glazed domed interior, Peltzig was under a great influence of Bruno Taut, the author of “the mythology of glass”. Taut believed that glass buildings would reduce the evil in the world. “Coloured glass destroys hatred” – wrote Paul Sheerbart, a poet and the architect’s friend.

   The expressionistic architecture proved to be a great influence of Nietzsche’s thought, expressing the Dionysian intoxication of the superman, who found fulfilment in this “will to power”, which was a state of emotional dynamism. In painting, the perfect representative of this current was a Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, the author of the first abstract watercolours. Their music equivalents were dodecaphonic pieces by Arnold Schöenberg and years later appeared sonorism.

   At the turn of the 19th and 20th century Charles R. Mackintosh, an architect from Glasgow connected with the movement “Arts & Crafts”, was a person of great importance to the new architecture. The creator of this current was William Morris, who died in 1896, an English writer, painter and graphic artist performing under the influence of John Ruskin. The artists from the “Arts & Crafts” movement met the needs of daily life in the best way. They tried to create a uniform style linking all the fields of art, architecture, painting, handicraft, and even the look of the book lying on a table in a room and house designed by them. The objective of these artists was an utopian idea to shape a new society thanks to an art embracing all the fields of life.

   Similar ideas were lying behind the activity of a group of artists under Walter Gropius’ command. The group focused around “Bauhaus”, a school created in Weimar in 1919, with a strong and long-lasting influence. In this architecture, a great part was played by simple solids and glass surfaces, flat roofs. Similar to their programme ideas of simplicity were used by musicians, writers, artists from different lines of the current, the so called “minimal art” active in the 1960s. In the first years of the existence of this school for builders, a great emphasis was put on handicraft.

   The programme of the “Bauhaus” was lectured by a mystic Johanes Itten. His beliefs in combination with the activities of futurists, dadaists and surrealists gave, in a way, the bases for the modernist attitude towards art. He trained his students in the ability to remove emotional and intellectual barriers. Itten called for the total destruction of the past, before a new and perfect society based on socialist ideas can be built. This constant negation of predecessors repeated over and over not only by the “Bauhaus” artist, influenced other social spheres, especially politics. Politics behaved as if only those being currently in power had a monopoly for ruling well. Hurling insults at their opponents became a rule and the most painful example of that was Nazism.

   Architects emphasized the technical infrastructure, which after many years led to the erection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977, outraging at the beginning with its pipes and lifts placed on the outside. The building created by two architects: Renzo Piano from Italy and Richard Rogers from England, remains irreplaceable in this regard even today. It is till shocking with its outer cuticle, but inside equipped with quite conventional rooms, even too small for huge modern paintings.

   Typical for modernistic artists was the interest in working-class houses and housing estates. In 1925 Le Corbusier designed houses for workers in the Passac estate close to Bordeaux. These “machines for living” fulfilled the ideological demands for moral revival and social reform, but they were uncomfortable and impractical. Le Corbusier’s influence on the everyday landscape of housing estates was not always a positive one. His Unité d’Habitation, ferroconcrete residential blocks in Marseille from the period 1946-1952 are “living units” inspired by socialist views, dated back to the 19th century. They constituted a turning point in the contemporary estate architecture. Designed as ideal buildings they heavily influenced much more primitive “high-rise blocks” known in almost every country of the former Eastern Bloc, also in Poland. Le Corbusier, like the futurists, was fascinated by speed and cars, and his passion reached its climax in the 21st century.

   In the 1970s Alina Szapocznikow suggested establishing a gigantic, marble sculpture of a car, but without success. Nowadays the sculptures of famous car makes made in crystal or metal have become extremely popular. There are huge, kinetic sculptures and gigantic installations created to worship particularly valued car makes. In the English county West Sussex on the speed festival organized for the centenary of Audi, Gerry Judah built a 32 metre high, soaring up, metal highway loop, on the ends of which he put the new and the old model of this car. The cars inspire artists of all kinds, starting with the ones designing museums and ending with those who invent patterns on bags and laptop shapes.

   Le Corbusier was also a precursor of other ideas. He raised a “Temple of Modernity” at

a common exhibition in Paris. It was meant to be a reconstruction of a Hebrew temple tent put up in the desert. The political character of this building was demonstrated by the inscription “the new era of solidarity begins”, a motto of the Popular Front – a leftist coalition which ruled in France then. The tent was considered to be a temple of the new, modernistic faith. Half a century later the motto of solidarity became a catchword in Poland too.

   Acting together with Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret created a column and beam architecture, very concise and reminding of wooden building, although he worked with ferroconcrete. He influenced to a great extent his closer and further successors. Taedo Ando, a Japanese architect very popular nowadays, uses ferroconcrete to create simple forms in it, referring to the Japanese temple. He did this too when he established the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth in Dallas, Texas. Norman Foster also uses slender columns, like those in “Carre d’Art” (1993) in Nîmes in Provence, where he alluded to the perfectly preserved Roman temple standing nearby called “Maison Carré”. Like his predecessors, he was fascinated by the role of glass, which he best expressed in the glass construction over the courtyard of the British Museum in London. Glass is one of the favourite materials of the American architect of Chinese descent, Ieoh Ming Pei, the author of amongst others the entrance pyramid on the Louvre courtyard (1989) and the glass staircase in the German Historical Museum in Berlin (2000).

   Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most outstanding modernistic architects, designed villas blended into the landscape, e.g. the very famous “House Over Waterfall” in Pennsylvania, built for Edgar Kaufmann in 1936. After ten years, between 1946-1952 Wright invented probably the first zoomorphic building, a snail-like form for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Zoomorphism became popular in architecture at the beginning of the 20th century, especially thanks to the Spanish architect Santiago Calatravy, the author of splendid museum buildings in Valencia, one of which resembles a bee, the other a whale. The Museum in Milwaukee, situated on Lake Michigan and converted by him obtained a new form of a bird, which opens its wings in the morning, and closes them in the evening. The bird inspired also Calatrava when he designed the Lyon Airport (1994).

   Considering the influence of modernism on our everyday life, we cannot forget the other completely different function of a museum building, resulting from a fundamental revolution performed in art in the last decades of the 20th and already 21st century. The museum in a Basque shipbuilding town, Bilbao, was built in 1997 according to the design of Frank Gehry and it is today the best known museum building all over the world. A wide-stretching sculpture form raised on the area of former docks, resembling half a flagship, half a full-blown rose and made of titanium plates is not similar to any building created before. This building became a work of art itself, admired more than all the things placed in its interiors. The cuboidal halls house mainly installations of various value or video shows. This building can hardly be called a museum, it is rather a gallery of continually changing exhibitions. Lately, inside this gallery in Bilbao, Andrea Frascher showed a video movie entitled “Little Franc and His Carp”. The artist performed an obscene dance, giving herself to the building, and at the end, while rubbing herself against one of the columns, she experienced erotic pleasure.   

   In fact, the dream of futurists rejecting all authorities and literally destroying the museums, what the poet Filippo Marinetti called for in his manifest a hundred years ago in 1909, has come true. Nowadays many curators of ancient art museums under the pressure of fashion place the newest installations and works of art next to the older ones. We can face such a situation in the Louvre, the Palace of Fontainebleau or Castello Sforzesco in Milan, where the paintings of the Italian Renaissance masters, including Pieta Rondanini by Michelangelo, must bear the company of contemporary pictures and installations. Such combinations cause irritation, but there is still a great audience approving of them. Maybe this approval comes from ignorance? Or the worship of ugliness? Some people visiting these museums for the first time accept this surprising neighbourhood as natural.

   Beauty is out of fashion now. It is even a synonym of kitsch. The artists aiming at beauty are pushed on to the sidelines. Already in 1993! a famous critic Clement Greenberg dedicated a study to the matter of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”. Today, the English philosopher Roger Scruton states that the rejection of beauty deprived the contemporary man of the joy of life. Krzysztof Warlikowski’s last adaptation of “King Roger” in the Paris Opera is the best example of the destruction of beauty. It showed death, narcissism and profanation instead of love – such vision gives no happiness. But in the scope of operatic adaptations, we fortunately have the outstanding Mariusz Treliński, who regards beauty as an essential component of the performance.

   There are no limits for the inventiveness concerning the expansion of new art. The line between art and everyday life is more and more blurry. Contemporary pictures and sculptures are presented in hotels, where they find a somehow compulsive audience. Such hotels exist e.g. in Athens, Berlin, Budapest and even in Poland, in the centre Manufaktura in Łódź and in a dadaistically called and equipped hotel “Lalala” in Sopot. Galleries in the hotels perfectly express the need of combining art with everyday life. Precursors of such ideas were the Japanese, who have been establishing art galleries on the shopping centres’ highest floors since the 1970s.

   New art does not need traditional museums. The art of video, happening and installation is not museum-like itself. It can be displayed in specially created rooms. Postindustrial buildings, such as the renown Tate Modern in London established in an old power station, are perfectly suitable for this purpose. In Poland a great museum of contemporary art was opened not a long time ago in Łódź in Manufaktura, which used to be Poznański’s factory. In Cracow the museum of contemporary art was organized in Schindler’s factory “Emalia”, where the owner managed to save over a thousand of Jews during the German occupation. This was depicted in an outstanding film “Schindler’s List” by Spielberg.

   A futurist building of the Museum of the 20th and 21st Century Art in Rome was erected according to the design of the famous Iraqi, Zaha Hadid. It is the first museum housing the archives of renown architects. In San Francisco, Daniel Libeskind designed a modern part to the old power station, serving as a Jewish Museum. Blue blocks make up the Hebrew word l’chaim – life. Renzo Piano raised or modernized several museum buildings in the United States, amongst others the Art Institute in Chicago, which holds the most important works of modernism. New museum buildings are nowadays the most creative branch of architecture.

   There is no doubt that architecture, and not painting, was in the last decades the queen of arts, although the time of its greatest magnificence is already over. Everyone is pretty tired with the bizarreness and extravagance of buildings, since technology allows the realization of even the most crooked and absurd constructions. The crisis forced the rejection of big plans to build a complex of towers wafting like flames in Dubai and a 612 metre high glass tower in Moscow designed by Norman Foster. The plans of the total redevelopment of Brooklyn in New York according to the design of Frank Gehry were given up, most of the houses would look as if they were just about to collapse.

   This nonchalance and bizarreness also concerns the objects of plastic arts. Many works created during the last decades will not endure through time, mainly because of poor materials, their imitative nature, ugliness, repulsiveness, arrogance and celebrating crime, but also boredom. All over the world there are attempts made to withdraw from this already old schema of figurative art of the “new old masters” brought from Los Angeles by Donald Kuspit and Krzysztof Izdebski, which came across a violent and dense resistance of the “avant-gardians”, as Paweł Huelle calls the post-art artists. The exhibition was held in the Gdańsk Branch of the National Museum, in the Abbots’ Palace in the Oliwa district in 2006. Press critics did everything to disdain the paintings of the two artists from Gdańsk: Krzysztof Izdebski and Maciej Świeszewski, although with their workshop accuracy they still make up an alternative against the dominating yarn-spinning. And this not only in Poland, but also in the whole world because everything that has happened lately has its counterparts in the global scale.

   Modernism and the post-modernistic world of art made us to accustom ourselves to the absurdity and even worship of ugliness. The need for beauty nearly does not exist, some handicraft domains remain a stronghold for traditional meaning, e.g. the constantly attractive Rosenthal porcelain. Such companies like Christofle or Puiforcat, now held by the Hermes Fashion House, established as early as in the 19th century produce tableware – pots, sugar bowls in traditional shapes, not only of gold or silver, but also using modern materials like pink titanium and plastic resembling a stone, called corian. In fact, these luxurious objects are an art for art’s sake, because they are not necessary to eat a breakfast or drink a coffee. They play the role of contemporary table jewellery as did once Cellini’s salt cellar made for the king Francis I, or Meissen figurines, brightening up the banquets since the Saxon times. Modernism has changed the tableware, the shapes of plates, knives and forks for straight, geometric, often angular ones. “Bauhaus” artists contributed to that striving to obtain the maximum simplicity. The “art deco” period, which is so popular nowadays, was famous for shapes of unique crystal decorations.

   In this regard many creative individuals came out in the 1920s. Not long ago an auction of works of art owned by Yves Saint Laurent and his friend Pierre Bergé offered an opportunity to remind the extraordinary artist, Eileen Gray. A Serpent Chair designed by her, made of leather with fancily curved wooden armrests was sold for 22 million Euros and it was the highest price ever paid for an object of decorative art created in the 20th century. The author of this chair was extremely popular in the 1920s. For her sister, who enjoyed eating breakfast in bed, she designed an E-1027 table, probably the best known modernistic piece of furniture. Gray was a versatile artist and she also designed a house for herself. Villa E-1027, situated on the sea cliff with a beautiful view, fulfilled the rule of maximum comfort in minimum space. Le Corbousier, who was a friend of her then, owes a lot to her talent. She got to know very well how to produce objects of lacquer, which she used to design partitions for her luxurious interiors that brought her fame.

   Less sophisticated objects of everyday use were created in new forms on a bigger, popular scale. Both handicraft and fashion turned to Japanese and Iberian art, which inspired tailors, hairdressers and milliners. We cannot forget that great art has for decades influenced the look of shop windows of various stores and shops. Nowadays, fashion designers try to outdo one another in dadaistic ideas. In his new autumn/winter 2009/2010 collection Alexander McQueen proposes birdcages or umbrellas as headdress, while Karl Lagerfeld offers a cosmic helmet covered with fur and Armani recommends a coat trimmed with kind of compact discs.

   In this deluge of nonsense and irrational confusion there are artists who create works unusual in every regard, like e.g. Olaf Eliasson, once a Scandinavian break-dancing master, who installed a gigantic, illuminating sun circle in the London Tate Modern Turbin Hall in 2002. The huge, artificial sun shining permanently in its inside, evokes at first an impression of wonder, of catching one of the divine secrets. Eliasson perfectly understood the principles of today’s art market, which is ruled not by the subtlety of ideas, but by means of astonishment. In 2008, according to this assumption the artist put four 30 metre high waterfalls in the East River in New York. Lately, the car magic overwhelmed him too and thus he designed a big BMW model, showed in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. The artist, when creating large works, cannot work alone, so he employs a whole team. He had a great predecessor in the pop-art master, Andy Warhol. He involved his friends in his screen prints, multiplying Coca Cola cans or Campbell soups. Then, on a large scale, a banal object of everyday use became a work of art, according to Duchamp’s recipe. Today, artists often do not even watch their serial production works sold in the Internet.

   One of Eliasson’s friends is the Polish action artist, Paweł Althamer. He designed a

sculpture gallery in the Warsaw district Bródno, where Eliasson will show his “Ice Kaleidoscope”. The artists are giving up traditional standing, hanging or even wrapped sculptures or buildings, as Joseph Beuys and Christi did, in order to obtain a new form of social sculpture. Sculptures start to exist not as an object but as a situation, a relationship between people. Some of these ideas are captivating and delightful!

   For Paweł Althamer, the 20th anniversary of the free elections on June 4th 2009, was an opportunity to invite 150 of his neighbours from the high-rise blocks in Bródno in Warsaw, where he has been living for 30 years now, to fly with a golden plane to Brussels, dressed in golden coveralls as golden aliens. They all spent a wonderful day in the capital of the European Union and returned to their flats in the evening. A fantastic idea and overwhelming effect! For years the artist has been carrying out the idea of becoming an astronaut who discovers Planet Earth. The centre of the universe is always there where he is. Thus, his estate Bródno is such a navel of the world. How much has the situation changed since the beginning of 19th century, when Izabela Czartoryska marked her place, Puławy, with a golden pin on the map as such a centre? It was an elite situation then and now, thanks to the Internet and television, millions of people can participate in such a feast. But actions of artists like Althamer prove the democratization of life more than that of art, and the blurring of the line between art and everyday life in its maximum and unprecedented scope. In times of Izabela Czartoryska, life was becoming art only for the restricted class and now it is achievable for many.

   During the last Biennale in Venice, the audience passing by the pavilions of Norway, Sweden and Denmark was surprised by the huge, quadratic pool with a dummy corpse floating in the water. This idea comes from Hitchcock’s films and for a while it stopped the public rushing off to new attractions, plenty of which were organized everywhere in this fancy funfair, as the space of Biennale can be described this year.

   Modernism and postmodernism made us to get accustomed to the fact that every absurdity is possible or, the other way round, there are no impossible things. Lately, we witnessed a situation hard to imagine not so far back. Michael Jackson, the king of pop, died on 26 June 2009 and the world froze in grief. The message of his death spread around all the continents and evoked an emotional turmoil. Billions of people all over the world (1/6 of mankind) watched the transmission of his funeral. No artist ever, neither Michelangelo nor Maria Callas, not even Elvis Presley was so bewailed. In this situation, it is impossible and not necessary to separate the real grief from commerce. The singer made a kind of a superman out of himself, he created another kind of race. He was neither white nor black, neither a man nor a woman, and he was not of any particular age.

   Out of yearning for perfect beauty, he became like his ideal, Diana Ross. Plastic surgeries gave him her face – the shape of her mouth and eyes. He was a father of three children and at the same time like Peter Pan, he had never physically grown up himself. His slim body emanated with extraordinary energy, his dance movements were like those of the black panther and made the air explode. On the other hand, however, they were kind of mechanical, as if he was the new Frankenstein, hansom and fit but yet an artificial man. He had actually no private life, no intimacy. He burned himself on stage in the light of camera flashes and laser reflectors.              

   He was an extraordinary figure. He fulfilled the mysterious, even gloomy needs of immortality on Earth. He was the idol of pop culture, but what kind of a man has he become during this time? As Łukasz Musiał wrote in “Tygodnik Powszechny”, pondering over Jackson’s anthropological phenomenon – the king of pop was created as kind of a “work in progress”, a dreadful biological project that may have been stopped in the moment of his death, being halfway between a human creature and a cyborg, between a man and a woman, a child and an adult, a hetero- and a homosexual, a white and a black person. He strived to achieve the ideal of beauty which would resist against time. At the age of 50 he looked like a timeless mannequin.

   Was he a new, better man created by scientific progress? At the end of his life he resembled rather a phantom from his first video clip “Thriller” (1982), which brought him fame and fortune. Did Jackson’s fate become a warning for so many artists ready for every experiment only to be a success, even when it leads to death, in this perdition on the border between life and art? It seems that the king of pop was a living and dramatic example of the “art of body”, reaching the furthest in self-destruction, because it was not a way to destruction of neither Vincent van Gogh, nor Ives Klein.

   The power of Jackson’s influence was astonishing, and its consequences were dangerous and extremely serious on a general scale. In a way, this black-white singer made it easier for Barack Obama to win the elections. The American society has already had a black pop culture hero and now it also has its black president. The phenomenon of America is that its elections influence the situation all over the world. Jackson became the world’s kind of “dark side of power” idol and the educated, rational and well-bred Barack Obama – his total opposite – became a king of order and clarity, ruling over the irrational, gloomy chaos. Life could hardly be more influenced by art.

   Nowadays, art may more than ever before be influencing the increase in the sense of the common luxury of everyday life There was an exhibition of watches in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and their dials presented African and Polynesian masks, very carefully reconstructed. As we can remember, years ago Yves Saint Laurent designed dresses with the pattern taken from Mondrian’s painting. Picasso and Lucian Freud designed labels on the bottles of Château Mouton Rothschild.

   The owners of fashion houses employ outstanding architects. In 2007 the Chanel brand ordered from the above mentioned architect, Zaha Hadid, a pavilion especially for the exhibition of art inspired by Chanel bags. This idea was reflected in 2009 in the exhibition of vintage bags from the collection of the National Museum in Cracow. Louis Vuitton, the producer of luxurious travel accessories entrusted Franck Gehry with designing the interior of the company’s building in Paris. The designers embellish the luxurious, golden and enamel jewellery and shawls by “Frey Wille” – one of the boutiques of this brand is situated on Nowy Świat Street in Warsaw – with motives taken from the paintings of Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt and from Japanese patterns. Dresses, bags, shoes, watches and jewellery are more often becoming works of art, and to buy them means to invest in art objects. Everyday life has become an art, but a democratic art, which is accessible for a social class much wider than it was as early as in the first half of the 20th century.

   Despite many extravagances, art is working out quite well. In Athens, at the foot of the Acropolis, the American Bernard Tschumi designed a building looking light and long, opened in June this year. It now houses the collection of the old Acropolis Museum, placed in a space ten times as big as in the old edifice from 1874. There are still many new buildings being raised for old collections. The Islamic Arts Museum in Doha, Qatar, containing the collections of Islamic art from the 7th to the 19th century, was designed by the 91 year old Pei. A modern edifice of the National Museum, according to the design of another great architect, the French Jean Nouvel is to be erected in Qatar too.

   Nouvel is also planning the Abu Dhabi Louvre, located on the artificial island Saadijat, which shall be opened in 2013. For the right to use the name and the exhibited items borrowed from Louvre, the sheik has paid 555 million dollars. Until recently, this idea would seem to be unbelievably extravagant, but it is also typical for the new era, joining the East and the West upon the rights of unity. It is a perfect annex to the discussions once held between the no longer living professor Edward W. Said and the conductor Daniel Barenboim, on the pages of a famous book! They both invented amongst others the renown orchestra comprising of Palestinian and Israeli musicians!

   Ancient art, based on the expression of beauty and a deeper reflection on man is still an untouched bastion of human culture. This art, and here we are talking about painting, sculpture and graphics, has survived, undamaged and well taken care of in the large and famous museums in London, Paris, Madrid, Florence, Rome and in the United States, especially in New York, Washington and Boston.

   These large museums took on the burden of offering art to the millions of people all over the world, not only in the form of constant exhibitions, but also in great temporary expositions, accompanied by impressive catalogues containing a compendium of information about masters and many fields of the ancient art. These museums have become institutes that often replace universities. Teams that work there, are highly qualified and they investigate works of the ancient masters using the most up to date achievements of humanistic and technical knowledge.

   Art, both the ancient and the new one, is the most essential part of human culture. Despite its many critics and opponents, it will be preserved as an intrinsic part of the human world, a source for everyday life to constantly draw from.

   And ancient art does not die, it is still alive, as the Italians proved in the summer of this year during the exhibition of the baroque portraiture in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, by placing there the busts of Gianlorenzo Bernini and Constanza Bonarelli gazing passionately at each other. There was an erotic field full of tension between the artist and his model, with whom he was madly in love, palpable for the audience even today. The great baroque art achieved its actual status here, it resembled one of the days of the lovers’ everyday life. Man needs love and beauty, and strives for happiness. All this – in spite of the tendency to defile everything that brings joy and harmony, a tendency lasting since the times of both world wars and enhanced by the cruelty of terrorism in the 20th and 21st century.

[Translation of a text originally published in the Gdańsk Artistic Quarterly “Bliza”, No. 1, Autumn 2009.]