Leonardo Boiko’s Diary

I can’t stand the “look but don’t touch” feel of the Western art tradition. I mean, I really can’t stand it. My æsthetic tastes were formed by the tea ceremony, which like the West features deep respect for beautiful objects — but where Western art expresses that respect by isolating the pieces behind a dozen “keep distance” signs, Japanese art was made to be manipulated, interacted, passed from hand to hand, exalted by the human touch instead of by its avoidance — when I visit a museum I find the aura of sanctity to be unbearable, like if I was a pig in a church.

I just went to an exhibition where the artist made a room wholly in red — walls, furniture, lamps, everything. It had a cozy feeling to it, like if one had just entered James Bond’s bedroom right in the middle of a spy-movie opening. Forgetting the chains and warnings of the Museum for a moment, me and my daughter promptly proceeded to try out red hats and glasses and sit in red sofas, only to be politely but firmly told not to touch anything. What’s the point?

(Side note: The artist put a Brazilian Hermes Lettera portable typewriter in there, but she didn’t notice the Lettera is not really red —it’s orangeish. That’s why I spray-painted mine 8)

When Andy placed commercial, mass-produced designs right in the middle of the Museum’s holy ground, it was shocking and innovative because it went counter to what everyone believed art to be back then. In the sixties. Since then, pasting a logo a hundred times is not shocking nor innovative anymore. Seriously, guys, stop. Think of something yourselves.

It’s ironic that pop-art backfired: in its attempt to take Real Art down from the pedestal, it ended up there herself — and now chocolate wrapping paper is raised to the realm of elitism by painters who can’t draw, while the bourgeois middle-class audience either pretend there’s some mysterious meaning to it or whines that “my son could do better”. The beast is tamed; pop is unpopped.