Hermitage Magazine MMX.XI
Issue No. 3-4 (16). Autumn 2010

A new issue of the Hermitage magazine
(No. 3–4 (16) 2010) was published.

Its main topic is contemporary art which is understood as a coded semiotic system with a lost key. The magazine presents almost all imaginable languages of art: architecture, music, sculpture, painting, photography, animated cartoons, cinema, circus, philology, language of colors.

The issue’s structure is based on intricate associations and connections between specific images and themes.
The issue includes: a video film by Oleg Karavaichuk, drawings and a cinema project by Yury Norstein, an interview with Antony Gormley, an essay by Ludmila Petrushevskaya and Pavla Krusanova, special reports on Cirque du Soleil and actual Turkish artists.

Letter of Director of the Hermitage
"Access code" to a "database"

Codes are made to restrict access to some information. Codes also enable a certain group of people to gain access to special information. Having access creates an advantage to people and enables them to enjoy the exclusiveness of using information.

Such is the code’s aesthetic role and it is clearly present in the encyclopedic museum. In principle, museum information is widely accessible. It is the essence and role of museums. At the same time, it is so diverse and multilayered that getting familiar with many of its aspects of its "database" (collections) requires special preparation, guidance and certain explanations. These matters are dealt with by the entire mechanism of the museum activities. Museum science and museum education enable to encode collections for many times and then decode them at various levels.

Making an intellectual effort in understanding the history and art is a sine qua non condition of getting the museum pleasure.

Mikhail Piotrovsky
Director of the State Hermitage

Hermitage
Magazine MMX.XI
Issue No. 3-4 (16). Autumn 2010
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