Hosts:
Nastya Onoshko:
My first question is about form—the form of art. We have our familiar, eternal forms, and then new ones emerge. We had stopped expecting them, yet they arrive nonetheless. Tell me, which of these new forms do you already consider established, and which ones are you still anticipating? I am referring to digital forms, NFTs, and so forth.
Marat Guelman:
I think this is a continuous process. That is, at one point, figuratively speaking, figurative paintings were called familiar, while Suprematist ones were unfamiliar. Later, all paintings became familiar, whereas certain objects were unfamiliar, and so on. So it’s not a sudden process, but a process of adaptation. You use the word "familiar" yourself, so your question boils down to what we have grown accustomed to and what we haven't. Since the days of the Roman marketplace, we have been accustomed to the fact that art always has an original and a copy; we are used to this.
For instance, when the first digital art appeared 30 years ago, we rejected it. Why? Because there is no copy and no original. If I sent you a file, you seemingly received the original file, but then what remains with me? It is a cultural fetish that there is a copy and an original, and that the original is created by the artist, costs a great deal, and is placed in a museum, while the copy is merely pocket change. This is what we are used to.
And this habit, which formed back at the Roman market where there were original Greek sculptures and very similar Roman copies—this habit existed since that time and was shattered only with the emergence of NFTs. It wasn't even shattered; rather, digital art conformed, learning to make copies and originals too. An NFT serves as the original file, and we now know that there is an original file—it sits here—and all other files are copies.
I am simply getting at the concept of what is familiar. For example, we are used to the fact that starting from the 8th century, a work of art has an author. Prior to that, works were sometimes unsigned, defined instead by certain schools or guilds. From the 8th century onward, works of art begin to belong to a specific author, and we are used to this. However, I predict that soon we will see collective art. Much like science began moving toward this at the end of the 19th century, when instead of giant named scientists, entire institutes and laboratories took their place, where an opening has thousands of authors. I believe we should expect works of art that have a collective author, and perhaps sometimes it will seem as though there is no author at all. These are the habits that are very difficult for us to break...
In principle, it seems to me that (I don't know the exact percentage, but) 5% of artists—and that means thousands of people—are thinking about creating art that we are not ready for, art that we are unfamiliar with. This means unfamiliar art appears every single day. And for now, among the unfamiliar, there is also good unfamiliar art and bad unfamiliar art. Generally speaking, when a person observes art "according to Pelevin," they experience two wow-impulses. One impulse is recognizing the old, and the other is discovering the new. You walk through an endless number of exhibitions all over the world, and on one hand, you rejoice when you recognize artists you've seen before. You say: "This is so-and-so, I know them." And conversely, you rejoice when you see something in an artist's work that you have never seen before, as a literal discovery of the new. I think that in a certain sense, these artists—this 5%—are professionals at breaking the familiar.
Nastya Onoshko: Does this breaking of the familiar pose any threat to traditional art, both in terms of its consumption and its value?
Marat Guelman: As long as art is—let's call it temporally bounded—it means it fits into art history. You take a look, you see: the first half of the 17th century, France; the second half... As long as it is temporal, the new poses no threat to the old, because the new occupies an additional tone rather than replacing the previous one. And in this sense, if some video art emerges, it in no way diminishes 17th-century painting; it diminishes 21st-century painting, but not 17th-century.
In this regard, every new medium, if we speak more broadly, clears a launchpad for itself, sometimes forming its own market, and sometimes competing in the market that already exists. But here we must keep in mind that this applies not only to the familiar, but to the entire art market—the fact that the new competes with the old. Imagine the market for, I don't know, suit jackets. Jackets are sold, but jackets also age and get thrown away. If you have a certain mathematical apparatus, you can compute how many jackets need to be manufactured per year so that the market continuously consumes them. If it suddenly turns out that new materials are durable, and people don't discard their jackets on time, your production stalls. So the market invents the mechanics of fashion: this jacket is still good, it can still be worn, but you will throw it away because it is out of fashion.
Nastya Onoshko: The lapel is just no longer right.
Marat Guelman: In art, old jackets, on the contrary, appreciate in value and remain in the exact same market. Contemporary artists sell, and artists of the past sell as well; their works are not utilized or aged, but on the contrary, they grow more expensive. This is a property of the art market in general; this is its complexity.
Art belongs to time, yes, conventionally speaking. But today, that notion is actually being called into question. At the very least, today is a period when you already... Previously, you looked at a work of art and could quite easily determine when it was created. Now that is gone; based on formal characteristics, art created today can be attributed to any era...
Nastya Onoshko: You mean to say it mimics other eras quite successfully?
Marat Guelman: It simply rejects this... It’s a long story, but what is it connected to? A work of art has many different criteria by which we determine good and bad. Since the second half of the 19th century, one of these criteria gradually began to displace the others—the criterion of the "new," the word "new." A work of art possesses many different qualities, and one of them is how new it is.
And this criterion—the new—began to displace all other criteria, and this went through the entire era of Modernism. Somewhere by the 1980s, one can say it displaced all other criteria, and only the new remained. And at that moment, naturally, this new was tied to this temporality—meaning art belongs to time—and this is where it began to malfunction. Artists began to abandon this criterion in their work, otherwise triggering all these talks about "art is dead." On the whole, one can say that art ceased to be temporal. Artists began looking not for a new path, but for an individual path. This became highly fascinating, and it was acknowledged then—and is still acknowledged today—that all artistic languages are equal. And a new language, certainly, at the moment it appears, causes a certain turbulence because a new language has emerged, but after a short time, it integrates as just one of the languages of the existing system. That is how it works. Of course, what is happening right now, at this very moment, looks a bit like a revolution: art before NFTs, art after NFTs.
A temporal boundary is occurring right now, and behind it, of course, it is highly interesting to observe and seek out the new criteria being born there. However, it is very difficult to forecast, of course.
Aysel Gereykhanova: Here is a question. It turns out that this temporal boundary coincided with the pandemic. Perhaps the pandemic even stimulated it somehow and became a new catalyst for this stage. This uniquely coincides with the endless complaints of cultural figures that everything is over, that their profession has been killed. I am speaking now not only about artists, but about singers too. So is a killing taking place right now, or is it a new life thanks to the fact that people are forced to move online?
Marat Guelman:
The pandemic, of course, accelerated these processes rather than shaping them. What happened today—this revolution was being prepared. I am talking about the fact that 30 years ago, artists began working digitally.
Nastya Onoshko: The earliest ones—what kind of works were those? Were they working in Paint? What are we talking about? Just for our listeners...
Marat Guelman:
Not even in Paint, but in ASCII. Remember, there was such a programming language text standard, ASCII. I remember perfectly well, I had a Mona Lisa drawn with symbols, crosses, and letters.
Nastya Onoshko: With letters, like on typewriters?
Marat Guelman: Yes, exactly. In short, artists began doing this 30 years ago. The market did not accept them, but they did not vanish because of that. They formed their own sphere, even if it was marginal. A kind of underground, an undercurrent. That is, previously the underground consisted of non-conformists hiding from the authorities, whereas this digital underground is outside the market.
Aysel Gereykhanova: Hiding from the mainstream?
Nastya Onoshko: People were doing something for the soul.
Marat Guelman:
You know, they formed their own infrastructure there. This is highly vital. That is, for example, when digital art began bursting onto the big market just now, it didn't burst in the way, say, Chinese art did. What is Chinese art? It’s when you have a certain number of artists, and they entered this global market, and this market accepted them.
Nastya Onoshko: We found out about them.
Marat Guelman: And after a short time, they were distributed among global galleries and collections; meaning, they were simply absorbed into the artistic situation. But these digital artists arrived with their own marketplaces—meaning they have their own sales venues—and with their own collectors, these crypto-millionaires and billionaires. And what is highly vital, what is interesting—they arrived with their own criteria, which did not align with the criteria of the mainstream market in half the cases.
Right now, a highly fascinating process is unfolding. If you go onto some digital marketplace, your first impression will be horror—meaning you will see millions of bad works; you won't even see the good ones.
Nastya Onoshko: Yes, exactly.
Marat Guelman:
There are indeed many bad works there, just like in any sphere, but on the whole, what is also vital is that they have their own criteria. And it is highly interesting how these criteria—some of them—are being implemented into the big market. The big market finds certain parallels to it. And this is a highly interesting moment when criteria shift. This revolutionary nature is tied not so much to the fact that everything moved to digital, but to the fact that from digital, art entered the big world and brought some of its own criteria along with it.
Nastya Onoshko: And what are these new criteria, for example? You mentioned that there is a vast amount of stuff that at first glance appears bad and unworthy.
Marat Guelman:
There are criteria that are new, yet old, but which had vanished. This is "labor-intensiveness." For example, when they evaluate a work of art in the digital world, they absolutely look at how many hours the machine spent computing it. This roughly corresponds to how contemporary art used to be evaluated based on how difficult it was to create, how long it took to paint, how many months. Here it’s a bit different; you need to demonstrate a certain operation of the machine, how complex the whole setup is, what kind of mathematics is involved. That is the first thing.
Second, since I touched upon mathematics—and this is already a revolution—the boundary between lyricists and physicists is destroyed. Highly interesting digital works are executed by mathematicians, not by artists. That is, they write self-reproducing algorithms, what is termed generative art.
Nastya Onoshko: A neural network, the kind that generates…
Marat Guelman:
No, it can be a specific algorithm, a program. You launch this program, and the program begins creating a work of art. I am not talking about neural networks; I am talking precisely about a specific artist who is a tech expert—at least to the same extent that they are a humanitarian. Meaning, the boundary between the physicist and the lyricist, between the mathematician and the artist, is destroyed.
Then a feature emerged that also fascinates me deeply in this generative art—multiplicity versus uniqueness. When a traditional artist creates a work of art, he makes a choice every single time: what color to make this element, what the composition should be. Meaning, he is constantly choosing. By creating one work of art, he has effectively discarded a hundred works of art that he did not make. Exactly like I say: make the background here red or green.
Nastya Onoshko: An interesting approach.
Marat Guelman:
Okay, red, but that means the painting with the green background is effectively unmade. That is, an artist, in creating a work of art, constantly selects one path and thereby rejects others. In the digital world, you don't have to reject; you can run through permutations. The most popular work...
Aysel Gereykhanova: Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn Monroe”?
Marat Guelman:
Andy Warhol serves as a parallel in this sense, but in the digital world, the most popular works are CryptoPunks. A series of roughly 10,000 works that are identical yet different. And it turns out collecting here is a bit different. You want to own your own unique CryptoPunk, but you are glad that you belong to a community of collectors who own these CryptoPunks.
Aysel Gereykhanova: To what extent can this world become a part of everyday reality?
Marat Guelman: This is already occurring. Right now at Art Basel, there are NFT booths. And what, we have plasma screens, and currently plasma screens are going to be made increasingly sophisticated and in any shape. You download an NFT into the plasma screen and hang it on your wall exactly the way a painting hangs. Of any size and so forth. The adaptation of art and the transformation of art into kitsch, so to speak, is an unstoppable process. We once had what were called screensavers on monitors...
Nastya Onoshko: Exactly.
Marat Guelman: They were, in some form, an adaptation of this generative yet computer-driven art to home life and everyday reality. There are no problems here. This must be studied—why? Not because there is a vast amount of interesting material there; there really isn't a vast amount of interesting material proportionally. But because this will absolutely influence artists, because these are some new criteria, and these criteria will be utilized, among others, by great artists who operate in the traditional world. This is a new era—generative art, multiplicity, the artist's refusal to choose, the art of running through options. This is interesting. But I want to say, this will develop in the literal near future, 2 to 5 years, and beyond that we know nothing at all, because we are promised the Singularity.
Nastya Onoshko: How do you understand this?
Marat Guelman:
I believe that out of all these developments, the destruction of the boundary between the physicist and the lyricist will be a revolution. Because further down the line, the boundary will be destroyed between the artist and not just the mathematician, but between the artist and the geneticist. I know one artist who, in collaboration with biologists, wants to create a rabbit with purple glowing fur. They are inserting a gene from some firefly. On the whole, the destruction of this division into artists and scientists is, it seems to me, fraught with some incredible discoveries. And this is highly fascinating.
Aysel Gereykhanova: How does the state relate to these new trends? Not only here in Russia, but generally. Does it scare them? Are they attempting to integrate somehow, or are they failing to notice for now? The state as a system, as power, as an institution.
Nastya Onoshko: Do different states react similarly to all these new trends?
Marat Guelman:
They mostly fail to notice it, and that is the best option. In principle, the state does not have the task—or rather, the state performs the task of working with the new very poorly. It can, in principle, establish certain platforms that generate conditions for the new, but working specifically with the new must be done precisely by individuals. The state should already engage with what is termed cultural heritage, once it has already been formed. The formula is this: you need to help young artists, not young art, whereas you need to preserve art itself, but the art that has already become cultural heritage. Another issue is that now the timespan between the concepts of a young artist and cultural heritage has shrunk to about 10 years. What used to take 50 to 100 years now takes about 10 years, sometimes even less.
Meaning, in the future—if we are talking about the future—the role of the state will be less and less, while the role of the city will be greater and greater. I will explain this later, but here is how it looks in the context of art. Let’s imagine an artist, and he traditionally has two partners—power and business. What does power want? It says: “Glorify me, be loyal,” but an artist doesn't always want that, at the very least, and rather more often than not, doesn't want it. Business says: “Create something beautiful for us, with gilding, design a corporate party, sing, dance,” but such glamour doesn't always appeal to an artist.
But what does a city want? Imagine yourself as the mayor of a city. You want your city to echo worldwide, so that investments start flowing our way. The artist says: “I want to create an event myself so that it resonates worldwide.” Or make it so that our youth, instead of roaming around with drugs, attend your performances or stand in lines at museums. And the artist also says: “I want there to be lines for my exhibitions.” Their interests align.
Furthermore, if you look at an average city—not a megacity, but an average city—you will see that the face of the city and the infrastructure of culture are always the exact same thing. You arrive in the center: on the right is a theater, on the left a museum, ahead a park. That is the main city square. They are together also because in the competition between cities, the primary instrument is the unique. We have been to Paris, but we will travel to Berlin. Why? Because Berlin differs from Paris. In the competition between corporations, it’s different—there, the competition is for the universal, whereas in the competition between cities, it is for the unique.
The artist is the ultimate supplier of the unique, which makes them partners—also because the city needs artists no less than the artist needs the city. Therefore, I predict that in the near future, the world will arrive at this very rapidly—to the point where urban identity will replace national identity. People will say not "I am Russian," "I am German," but will say "I am a Berliner," "I am a Muscovite," "I am a Nizhny Novgoroder." And within this competition between cities, the artist will become a pivotal figure, just as the scientist was a pivotal figure in the competition between corporations.
Aysel Gereykhanova: Here is a question. You say that the interests of the state and the artist, or the interests of business and the artist, currently do not align and most frequently fail to align. But we look into the past and see that antique sculptors, among others, quite frequently executed works commissioned by state figures. In the end, we still travel there to enjoy all of this and copy-paste these somewhat tacky columns for our businessmen. And all of this was left behind frequently following the collaboration of state figures.
Marat Guelman: I am not saying that wasn't the case. I am saying that the new era will be characterized by this. Because the city was transforming during this time. Look, 2000 years ago, a city was a fortress wall that protected you from enemies. That was its primary distinction. Then gunpowder and cannons were invented, which destroy these walls. The function vanished. The city did not vanish; it became a trading square. A place where we exchange goods.
A bit later, the city became a place where we find work—meaning people came there to earn a living. Today, the city—especially after the pandemic, when we learned to work online—is a business that caters to leisure time. That is, the life of a person in Paris or in Budva differs in how he spends his leisure time. Imagine a teacher: he walked into a classroom in Paris, walked into a classroom in Budva—meaning his entire working and domestic life do not differ at all; the only difference is in the leisure time. And if you examine the so-called business of catering to leisure time, you will see that its finest part—50%—is culture and theater.
Meaning, we are talking about what will be tomorrow, not about what was yesterday. This attempt to prolong the past is misplaced. You know that for a tremendous amount of time, artists had a primary client—the Church; meaning the symphony of art and the Church essentially generated and led to the victory of Christianity and the development of art. And what, are we supposed to draw some conclusion about the Church from this now? When these are entirely rudiments.
The earliest art markets were markets of plundered goods, because when cities were captured, what could I carry away with me on my horse? I couldn't carry away a flock of sheep or a luxurious palace. I walked in, seeking certain things that could be carried away. Yes, it was preferable for it to be made of gold, but on the whole, I carried away certain works of art. One can spend a highly fascinating time debating the past, but let's talk about the future.
Nastya Onoshko: Just a second, literally a quick remark on why I pointed to the past—because I am highly concerned precisely about what will remain in the future. Because in the past, officials, conventional officials, businessmen, and merchants left behind those mansions that we admire now, which on the whole represent artistic value. But something happened at a certain juncture with our businessmen and state figures, judging by the raids and searches we subsequently see—this continuous diamond-and-gold little hellscape, which is highly unlikely to represent any value the moment they are gone. What will happen in the future? Is there anything interesting?
Marat Guelman:
I understand you. The primary remark here regarding the future is that when we debate the future, it makes no sense for us to debate what is happening in Africa, where there are tribes in general. That is, we understand that there are certain spaces where the future is forged, and yes, unfortunately, it must be said that today Russia is not such a space. Period.
Aysel Gereykhanova: Can I ask about the liberating leisure time now? The new lifestyle has already arrived, established itself even several decades ago. Everyone notes that people of the advanced world possess increasingly more leisure time. There is a task to utilize it, like Alice in Wonderland. And in this regard, I have a question regarding the development of art, the tools of which have become far more accessible to everyone now.
With the emergence of phones and so forth—yesterday a child approaches me, my fourteen-year-old daughter, and shows me a video clip from TikTok. It’s edited, there’s some music, special effects are overlaid. And she shows it to me and says: "Look, see, this is art." Well, she is a sophisticated girl—meaning she knows literature and understands things a little bit, she is generally aware of the entire history of art in broad strokes. She tells me: "This is art." And she creates something similar herself, actually spends time, shows this clip.
To me as a viewer, it seems that everything looks more like a circus. Meaning there is a very primitive montage; yes, that kind of art too—after all, the circus used to be considered an art form as well. I understand that a tremendous amount of leisure time exists, which will increase even further in the long term; right now children are suffering and studying, and later I don't know how they will study. In adulthood, time is increasingly compressed, and work efficiency rises. Will there be some qualitative transition because everyone holds these capabilities in their hands and due to the emergence of leisure time in art? Previously, one had to break through a combination of circumstances. How many Vrubels did we fail to discover? They might not have manifested themselves. Will there be some transformation in perspective, what do you think?
Marat Guelman:
It is already occurring; or rather, it has also always occurred. When the camera emerged, a vast number of people effectively became artists. Let’s imagine a world in which 80% of the labor is executed by artificial intelligence, and here are the people. They don't need to run restaurants, open venues, and so on and so forth; they are left to their own devices. But to prevent them from degrading—let's assume they even receive this basic income, meaning they don't starve to death—they need to engage in something. At the same time, the external world doesn't signal to them: "Listen, this is missing here, you need to make this." They must invent for themselves what to engage in.
If we look at an artist, we see that an artist is precisely a professional at creating what is needed by no one, and subsequently imputing to the world the notion that you all need this very much. When a work of art is created, it is not a reaction to marketing; it is created based on the artist’s understanding that it is necessary. And yes, in a certain sense, the majority of people will become artists. Will this lead to a transition of quality? Yes. On this, we seem to agree.
I have a theory that mass art will transition into mass-like art (massovidnoye). Right now there is mass art, conventionally speaking—elite or professional art for professional circles and fundamental science, while mass art is designed for millions. Mass-like art will be art created by millions, where conventionally speaking the number of viewers and the number of creators will be roughly equal. Every viewer is simultaneously a creator, but most likely this will develop as certain waves or trends. Your daughter saw someone's video clip and wanted to make the same one. And the metric of success will be not how many people watched your clip, but how many people, inspired by it, created their own similar clip. That is the difference between mass and mass-like art.
I actually understood this situation in Tokyo; there is a fashion quarter there, and every shop is a designer’s shop where there is not a single repeating dress—meaning all dresses are unique. And through these shops walk equally unique teenagers, each of whom is also an artist, because by selecting their dresses there, they construct their individual world. And it is completely unclear who among them is more of an artist—the designer who created this item, or the teenager who builds themselves in this manner. All these brands—Dior, whatever—that is for the poor in spirit. I assume there will be a major crisis for these big brands, and in this turn, it won't be Germany or America that wins, but some young, interesting country, but it won't be Russia.
Nastya Onoshko: Sad.
Aysel Gereykhanova: I have a final question regarding the transnational nature of these things. We mentioned Africa as a distinct world, a continent, and also Central Asia. But in reality, thanks to the communications revolution, this border has already been nudged slightly. Nothing is splashing over to us from Africa yet, but things are already splashing over to us from China, despite its Great Firewall. We are already beginning... Meaning I feel myself to be a consumer, a user of this unified cultural space as well, because I know Chinese artists, I know these TikTok clips that my daughter considers art. In this regard, this communications revolution carries us upward above state borders and ceases to limit us. Correct or not?
Marat Guelman:
Generally, in the humanitarian sphere, unlike the technical one, the term "lagging behind" is an inaccurate term. Because any humanitarian inherits all the humanitarian knowledge generated anywhere in the world. A new artist creates the new in relation to everything. Lagging behind, of course, is tied to technologies rather than to art. We simply understand that in this situation, when the environment is not conducive, these humanitarians will simply seek another environment.
I live in Montenegro; here, for example, Russian people are the most enterprising—meaning here, even Montenegrins hire Russians with greater eagerness than Montenegrins themselves. Until people live here, they don't believe it. Why? Is it because the people are worse? No, they aren't worse; they entered this environment that stimulates this creative, entrepreneurial impulse. Therefore, yes, I am confident that Brills and many other people will be born in Russia who will make leaps into the future, but they will execute this somewhere else.
There is a fascinating index that was shown to me in Odesa—a sad index of the ratio of famous people born in the city to famous people who died in the city. During the pandemic, New York emptied out due to the fact that when everything transitioned temporarily to the internet for a year, it suddenly became clear that the climate is bad, after all. And this turned out to be vital...
Aysel Gereykhanova: Everyone migrated to Florida…
Marat Guelman:
You joke, but that’s exactly how it is; very many relocated to Florida. Pensioners in Miami…
Aysel Gereykhanova: And creators to Florida...
Nastya Onoshko: Yes, great... New York will also have an index later like Odesa. Can I ask the very final question? We talked a lot about form, about new forms, about these revolutions. I had a prepared question regarding meanings. At one point, even when I was little (it was a hell of a long time ago, I don't know, 30 years ago), talks were already circulating back in the 20th century that everything has already been said, absolutely all thoughts have been expressed and there is nothing left to talk about; only the form changes, various elements like actionism or NFTs are added.
As for meanings, art right now... I work in the media and understand that news flows and flows, it is highly monotonous, in reality, rarely does anything critically new transpire. It is continuous; it doesn't end as long as humanity is alive. Can one draw a parallel between news and art—is the birth of new meanings occurring? Or, much like the news, does this production of all sorts of new forms simply float along, always filled with the exact same content?
Marat Guelman:
I mentioned the new—since art is the most advanced sector in this matter, it arrived at the crisis of the new quite a long time ago, meaning somewhere in the '80s, which makes it 40 years ago. It is highly vital to study this situation when the new ceases to be new. And from there, several forks emerge. Initially, people say: "That's it, the end of art," meaning all criteria are thrown out. There was the criterion of the new, and the new is impossible, therefore it's the end of art, and so on.
The first path was the transition from a gesture to an act. Let’s imagine art that constitutes an act. Take a metaphor: say, you save a child or you lower taxes. Nobody will approach you and say: "You know, this has already happened before you; people were already saving children, or before you they fell in love, had sex, or lowered taxes." That is, art can transition from the zone of gestures into the zone of acts; this is a vital path.
Second is the actionist postmodernist response to this crisis of the new. This is a departure from temporality, a transition to the cultural landscape. This is a highly fascinating thing; in a certain sense, it was assumed when everything exists for you simultaneously. You look at a landscape: you have a lake in the foreground, a forest in the background, mountains further back, then the sun, but they exist simultaneously in your landscape that you paint as a picture. Art is exactly the same. It exists simultaneously, so to speak.
The concept of the new vanishes because, for example, the Russian Avant-Garde is the successor to the Russian icon, while all the Russian art that sat between them belongs to another place, another time. A 14th-century Russian icon turns out to be more contemporary than 18th-century salon painting. Why? Because a contemporary artist, Malevich for example, takes this icon and works with it as something new. The departure from time, from what the new is—this is fundamentally highly interesting.
But our time, today's time—I attempted to begin with this—presents us with the destruction of the boundary between lyricists and physicists. This is what existed since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, when he had his art and his engineering, and they were separate. And since then, these two lines walked and opposed each other, claiming that this represents different thinking, and now these two lines converge again. How can one say...
Aysel Gereykhanova: This sounds cool, but if the ultimate outcome is a rabbit's glowing fur, then of course, the meaning...
Nastya Onoshko: That isn't the ultimate outcome, what are you talking about? That is some initial stage of a massive, unpredictable process...
Marat Guelman:
There will be many artists who will do many different things, and something will emerge. I usually put it this way: when you step out onto some outdoor art market, like we used to have in Izmaylovo, you understand that for every one beautiful picture, there are a hundred unbeautiful ones, but beautiful doesn't mean good yet. That is, art operates with redundancy initially, so first you need to taste this transitional flavor, and artists will throw themselves at what might be superficial elements.
But by the way, there is a highly beautiful work—this is precisely an example of a good artist utilizing new technologies. Matthew Barney, a highly famous artist, created paintings out of mold. He fed the mold with colored broth in a certain manner, and it grew. It was something incredibly powerful, even though the exhibition itself looked like a scientific laboratory because some liquid was dripping continuously. I would observe that, at the very least. This transformation is, on the whole, part of the fact that creativity is becoming a truly universal line of activity. For example, in NFTs again—I forgot to mention this, but it’s simply the most obvious—music and visual art are beginning to operate together.
Aysel Gereykhanova: Did you buy an NFT for yourself?
Marat Guelman:
I even have a company. I established a small company focused on NFTs; I have my own concept there, and I think in a couple of years I will blow things wide open.
Aysel Gereykhanova: We will be watching.
Nastya Onoshko: Thank you, Marat, thank you so much for dedicating so much of your time to us, we didn't even expect it, thank you immensely. It was highly fascinating.
