Letter of the Director of the Hermitage

"The Lessons of Las Vegas"

The classic work on Las Vegas by architect Robert Venturi was a coffee-table volume when work on the creation of the Hermitage Guggenheim Exhibition Center in Las Vegas was going on. The Center opened in 2001 just a few months after the attack on the WTC Towers in New York, and it was a kind of response to that challenge. For the project, the main challenge was Las Vegas itself, a city with the aesthetics of industrial kitsch. The elegant walls created by Rem Kolhaas, and the elegant pictures and names from the Hermitage, Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Guggenheim were in contradiction with the sham sumptuousness of the Hotel Venetian. What resulted was an artistic event that changed Las Vegas. Now exhibitions became a normal phenomenon in various places around this city.

Kitsch is the democratization of high" art. It also can become art if it is correctly placed in the context of "good taste." Then vulgarity and snobbism create an interesting duet. There are many such concerts in all museums. That is also a special dialogue of different cultures, a part of the history of culture. In the Hermitage, where there is everything, we also have a fair amount of permanent and temporary combinations of the high and the low. The divine works of Fra Angelico are very unusually combined with the dessus-de-portes of the Seventh Reserved Apartment (that so very traditional name of the Old Hermitage). Any object placed in a museum becomes an exhibit item. Vulgarity brought into a museum can become an artistic phenomenon. Everything depends on the finesse of the museum staff and of the spectators.

The task of a museum is to cultivate good taste in art, culture, historical awareness, in the manners of people and in their ability to think. A museum does this not in a didactic manner, without presenting standards, but by involving the spectator in a multitude of contexts for very similar objects. The results can sometimes be strange, but they are always interesting.

Mikhail Piotrovsky

Director of the State Hermitage

Contents of the magazine:

From the editor-in-chief

Events

Museum of the Avant-garde
The first skyscraper
from dialectics to superstructure
Art in the internet
New acquisitions
Half a billion for Impressionism
Van Cleef&Arpels+Christie's

Kitsch

Arkady Ippolitov
In praise of kitsch
Good taste - one of the forms of racism and fascism. The accusation of lacking taste is more offensive for a woman than a hint at her age, but for a man it's like putting his potency in doubt.

Ekaterina Andreeva
Strategic raw material
A kitsch object born to decorate the world. The mission of the modern artist is to help fulfill this destiny.

Vladimir Paperny
The fertile meadows of Las Vegas
Here everything is authentic: huge amounts of money to lose and win and the masterpieces of Picasso and Van Gogh, and decorations depicting the Eiffel Tower or a piazza in Venice

Kitsch: straight talk

Nikas Safronov
Vyacheslav Zaitsev
What's kitsch?

Kitsch: exhibitions

Kira Dolinina
Lauritz Tuxen

Olga Sosnina
Gifts for leaders

Kitsch: photo session

Ilya Utekhin
Wedding with Atlases

New Year's

Kitsch: iconography

Arkady Ippolitov
Ape
Art - the ape of nature. The way an ape imitates man, so an artist imitates works of nature. The link between art and taste is evident. An ape is the embodiment of imitation, the embodiment of kitsch.

Kitsch: collection

Darya Agapova
White bone
The only museum of porcelain in St Petersburg was opened in 1844. Today it is one of the branches of the State Hermitage

Portrait

Galina Vishnevskaya
Portrait in an interior
Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich have been collecting Russian art long and passionately. Mainly from the 18th century.

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exhibitions
conferences
books
opera
letters from our readers

The Outlook

Announcements of exhibitions by Russian and foreign museums

Anniversary: Friends of the Hermitage

Contact information:
Contact person: Maria Berntseva
Director of Marketing
E-mail: berntseva@sptimes.ru
Telephone: +7 812 325 60 80

Hermitage Magazine, Winter Issue, 2006-2007 No. 5