Whilst my title may imply some shallow meaning, it is intended to echo the deadpan and non-egotistical approach to the titular taken by the artist, on which more later. Worth mentioning of course that this masterpiece by Modest Mussorgsky was based on a largely lost series of watercolour sketches in an exhibition by the artist and architect Viktor-Edouard Hartmann (1834-1873), who had died a year previous to the suite’s production. This in itself is curious fact in that we understand the inspirational impact of the work by proxy, but not by the works themselves.
In a similarly disembodied vein, there are few things weirder than writing a thought piece based on remote viewing an online gallery exhibition, the hazard being of course that we play out, in public, a game of critical Chinese Whispers based on Photoshop phantoms. In fact, I have no idea if this exhibition is ‘real’, other than it is as real and unreal as any other screen-based entity or object in my current, screen-bounded world. see full article here.
Neil Powell 