“On the power of art in a time of hysteria”

– Mikhail Borisovich, this is not the first pandemic in humanity’s history. There has been plague, cholera, smallpox… They have left their mark on our memory. Still, what is happening now is an unprecedented situation. Increasingly we are hearing, “When we come out of this, the world will become different.” Do you think so too?

– The world will become different. It will become different of its own accord; some people will try to arrange it to suit themselves; some will try to make it the way others want…

Now the borders have been closed, everyone has withdrawn to their own “apartments”. The world is fragmenting. Society is also fragmenting into different categories.

The progressive advance of virtual reality will continue into the future. And people will want to continue contact-free interactions. We will see the continuing triumph of the Internet, professional and amateur, where everyone says what they like – today even more than usual.

All those things will carry over into the new life. Still, in their responses to our virtual programmes people are writing how much they want to go to the Hermitage, to queue up for the museum. They want contact.

In the future we shall have to combine what has been achieved recently with what we had earlier, to find a dynamic stratagem and not simply wait for the world to change and see what comes out. Today we are thinking what the museum should be like, what functions it should have in order to preserve the good things that existed before quarantine and to make use of the new ones.

– In the 21st century, we are fighting against nature with varying success. At times it wins, at times we do. We construct dams to prevent floods, try to predict earthquakes. A new virus appeared, and in three months the world changed. Why did we turn out to be unprepared?

– I think it was because we got too swollen-headed. Relations between humanity and nature have become catastrophically strained. Ecological disasters, climate change, the destruction of natural regions… Humanity decided that it can do whatever it wants, that it has an answer to everything. And that’s just not true.

How should we behave in a situation when people around us are dying from an epidemic? We can’t come up with anything better than isolation, introducing restrictions and bans. The approaches being employed now were used centuries ago.

We have been thinking too much about how to conquer nature, how to impose things upon it, and not about how to reach a consensus with it.

Nature is a single organism. like a museum, where everything is joined together and should harmonize. The museum exists not for the visitor, but for itself, so as to preserve cultural heritage. Among its functions, only one is to show things to people, deciding for itself what they should see.

It’s the same in relations between humanity and nature. Nature has its own laws. We live alongside it and should not be doing whatever we want. It’s the usual thing: the freedom of some ends, where the freedom of others begins. A certain crisis of the consumer society is inherent in this conflict. Nature has decided to test us.

That’s one aspect of the problem. There is another. We are not prepared for states of emergency. We do have a Ministry of Emergency Situations, training, drills for the event of fires or floods. There is no fear that a catastrophe might happen.

In recent times people have lost the feeling that everyone had after the war – “God forbid that that ever happens again. Nothing could be worse, we should do anything at all, make any concessions, just so long as there isn’t a war.” The confrontation between the USSR and USA was built on that.

Now, against a background of television shows with shooting and piles of corpses, it seems that there is nothing terrible about it. War – so what? People had begun to lose the understanding that there are things that mustn’t be allowed under any circumstances, that not everything is in our power.

We got too swollen-headed about what we had achieved: we have a digital economy, electronic documentation… As soon as something happened, that all turned out to be window-dressing. Not a single piece of paper has any validity without a hand-made signature. The joke that everyone has a computer and there is twice as much paperwork proved to be true. In point of fact, serious decisions are not taken without a dozen bits of paper. The number of unnecessary queries and demands has increased.

In general, we have proved unprepared for difficult situations. The present situation is difficult. It’s not clear where the enemy is, what this virus is, what we can do about it. We are trying to accomplish something with stabs in the dark.

– Mikhail Borisovich, everyone was proud of the world being open; many people made use of that. A simple example is that when the pandemic broke out we were faced with the problem of bringing back our countrypeople who were spending the winter in countries with a warm climate. In the past, the plague was brought by ships; this virus travels by plane, which is much quicker. Globalization, an open world, has not proved to be such a blessing, has it?

– Right now, that’s the main problem. Just look, how dreadful – because of globalization not only has each of us lost their national identity and found themselves in the grip of “accursed worldwide capitalism”, but this infection has also spread. The economic side of globalization makes the world dependent on a crisis in some American bank or other. Clearly that needs to be limited somehow.

But the openness of the world is a blessing. The meaning of humanity’s existence lies in it. When people exchange spiritual values, those values become shared. The cultural side of globalization is a great achievement.

Of course, today everyone is closing doors: my home is my castle. People are keeping apart socially. The requirement to stand two metres from each other is symbolic. Not only countries, but people are becoming separated. They’re saying, “Why talk in person, when we can do it online?”

I think that anyone who is used to exchanges between different cultures will understand that is bad. Bad because we are losing tremendous cultural richness. That has to be explained to people and made clear.

Some time ago, when international relations grew tense, we said that bridges of culture should be the last to be demolished. That applies now too. That bridge should remain in existence all the same, especially as we have online capabilities that make it possible.

Many are going on the defensive, building boundaries. We should be crossing them, finding ways to prevent them interfering.

Our life in the museum was always accompanied by cries of “You scoundrels, why on earth are you taking our cultural heritage around the world, where’s your patriotic pride?” Now that is growing stronger. “Why take valuable things abroad in a dangerous time?” That will be the same in all countries. We will be discussing it with the heads of the world’s biggest museums.

Globalization has its pluses and minuses. We need to preserve its good aspects, the cultural component. In the millennia of its existence besides the creation of culture humanity has nothing to be proud of. Culture needs to remain our common asset, despite borders, conflicts, diseases…

Our task is to preserve a “cultural Schengen zone” and green corridors.

– How long will it take to re-established contacts and have they been preserved?

– Contacts have been preserved. We are in constant touch with our colleagues. I just received a letter from some Italian colleagues about the exhibition “Canova. Eternal Beauty”, where our sculptures have become stuck. They are planning to re-open the museum and are asking to extend the exhibition. We are discussing how to behave in situations when more guarantees than usual are required and to what degree they apply. We will adapt, find ways out of the situation.

At the moment when the borders closed, it became impossible to remove things from any museum. There has to be a solution. Artworks in crates are not as infectious as people. Still, there was no way out. The Italians could have let the consignment cross their frontiers, but then it might have got stuck somewhere in the middle of Europe. We need international agreements that grant culture a special regime. That’s what we have constantly been talking about. In the cultural sphere there should be separate rules for the allocation of commissions, insurance, customs…

I think that we need to remind people once again that culture is our greatest asset. We need to concern ourselves about its rights, sometimes to the detriment of the rights of the individual or nations.

– Quarantine, as you already said, has prompted the widespread use of virtual reality, in museum life as elsewhere. What about the assertion that the authentic article is of indisputable value, but the virtual object is to some degree a surrogate?

– The virtual is not a surrogate. I have heard statements about the authentic article being everything, while anything else is trash from the mouths of people who cannot tell the real thing from a fake.

No-one has so far managed to work out how the authentic article begins to affect people. For someone who is unprepared it makes no difference whether they see a painting on the screen or in the museum. For someone who is prepared, it is important what the setting for the painting in the museum is, the atmosphere around it. For that, you need to listen to lectures and guided tours of the Hermitage.

Visitors who come to the museum for the first time in their lives for an hour and a half are affected by the authentic article, but only in conjunction with the museum surroundings and the guide’s commentary.

It’s possible to play with the issue of authenticity, using virtual reality. The online experience is not better than contact with the real thing, but it is a means and opportunity to see more, to delve deeper into meanings, overt and hidden. It’s interesting to grasp and explore those. Someone wrote that in a lifetime of regularly visiting the Hermitage they haven’t seen as much as in the month and a half of the museum’s “cultured isolation”.

Today many people can’t see well without glasses. When the classic pictures were painted there wasn’t artificial lighting. The artists realized that the light would change. Paintings were coated with varnish. People knew that it would turn yellow. Artists were aware that pictures would darken with time. They took account of that. A new painting was brightly coloured, with the intention that over time it would get darker, like gilding, and gain nobility. That is all well known. There is a path that leads to the authentic object. it can be travelled using technology.

Different variants of authenticity and reproduction are known from history. There are things that are unique, that cannot be reproduced today. Fifteen years from now, though, the technology will be in place to repeat with absolute precision any work of painting even down to the craquelures. The search is beginning to find out if paintings have a soul. The Internet and digital technologies do not provide nuances, but they do help us to see a lot.

– All the same, people are starting to miss real-life impressions. It seems that virtual things impoverish us?

– At some point they do not impoverish, but even enrich. You can see a lot without having to go through customs, without taking a plane or a train, without buying tickets, without being jostled in a crowd…

But suddenly you begin to miss all that. To miss the ritual. There is faith and then there is ritual. Cultural life has its rituals.

The present is a time of hysteria. It will continue to be so. People are in a dreadful psychological state. Soon we will discover that in full measure. Art is capable of influencing you, even when you are sitting at home in your slippers. It has a therapeutic power, an ability to “straighten people out”, to calm, to help them get over upsets. It’s not a case of take a glance at Leonardo’s Benois Madonna and everything’s fine. But if you look long enough, the very idea of the Virgin and Child does help and bring calm.

When I record programmes from home, I not only change my clothes, but also put on outdoor shoes. The story goes that when Tvardovsky started to read Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he got up and put on a jacket, collar and tie.

– Let’s suppose we are re-opening the Hermitage. What’s going to happen to the queue? Will people be standing two metres apart?

– We can get rid of the queue by introducing timed sessions, but the Hermitage is a museum that people come to for a whole day. How do you make people leave after an hour and a half? We can’t guarantee someone that if they have bought a ticket in advance, they will definitely get in without queueing. Perhaps, in the present circumstances, when there will be strict rules, that is possible, though.

Now all the online programmes are free of charge, but behind that lies the problem of copyright. How do we work out what will be free and what we will charge for? How do you monitor people who are working from home? There are a host of questions that I am asking my colleagues. While we do not know when we will come out of quarantine, we are discussing what to do about the queues, the climate in the halls, copyright, how much of our activities will be online, how we are going to get money…

A third of visitors get into the Hermitage free of charge. People call that a concession. It’s not a concession, but a gift, money taken out of the museum’s purse. The Hermitage is the only museum in Russia that lets pensioners in free. That is a major financial burden. Under the new circumstances, we will have to think whether we can afford that if we have no money coming in.

– People have found themselves shut up in their own four walls. The Hermitage does not have the youngest staff. Up till now it was being said that 65-plus is an age when you can still manage a lot. Then suddenly that population group turns out to be a weak link. How should elderly people get through this psychologically difficult moment?

– It’s a difficult question, especially for those who don’t have the ability to work remotely. You need to understand that this restriction was caused by a state of emergency. you need to be prepared for the moment when it ends. There is a feeling that nature is using the pandemic to get rid of the weak, but people at the age of 65 are still full of vigour.

In the Hermitage there is plenty of remote work. We are not laying anyone off. If a person can work, we need to find a way of using the experience and knowledge that they have. The museum did have properly organized remote working already – library days, paid leave to write a book… Now the opportunity has arisen to work out how to obtain the maximum benefit from people without forcing them to come to work for 10 o’clock and leave on the dot of 6.

The world is complicated. It cannot get by without people who have experience and, no less importantly, stability inside their heads. In the world around us, stability is vanishing more and more.

This material was published in the Sankt-Peterburgskiye Vedomosti newspaper № 084 (6682) on 20 May 2020 under the headline “On the power of art in a time of hysteria”

https://spbvedomosti.ru/news/culture/mir-stanet-drugim-mikhail-piotrovskiy-o-tom-chto-izmenitsya-posle-pandemii/