Category: art

Surreal Daydreams: Cooking Up a Fantastical Adventure | February 08 2026, 15:36

Just a normal day

So I decided to fry some eggs. I grab the frying pan, and it asks me, “Which floor?”. Unfazed, I pull a piano out of my pocket and press the brake pedal. Suddenly, a flight attendant pops out of the oven and politely asks: “Tea, coffee, or hold a brick?”. I chose the brick, because it was checkered blue and smelled of spring.

I step out onto the balcony and see — instead of a courtyard, there’s an ocean of kefir. I get into a submarine, start the chainsaw, and then a traffic cop on a dolphin stops me. He whistles into a cucumber and says:

— Why are you without a panama hat in a public place?

I show him my passport, but instead of a photo, there’s a dressed herring. He bursts into tears of joy, gifts me a cactus, and flies away on an umbrella towards Syzran.

I go back inside, wanting to put the cactus in a vase, but the vase has married a vacuum cleaner and left on a honeymoon to the mezzanine. Well, I spit, wiped the sweat away with a towel, but it turned out to be the neighbor’s cat. The cat meowed, turned into 18 rubles in a single coin, and rolled under the sofa.

I approach it, get in the elevator, sit down on a bicycle, start a motorcycle, then bang, a conductor comes up to me and says, “Sir, give up your seat”. And I say I don’t smoke. Then this kid starts crying! But I didn’t lose my cool, and hit him on the face, and he grabs his knee and screams: “My back! My back!”

I exit this electric train,

and see, there’s a minibus standing there. Well, I approach and say: “Winston Blue and 0.5 vodka”. But it gives me Bond and beer. I take this prima and moonshine, and run away from those cops! Then these firefighters caught up with me in an ambulance! Caught up and say: “You forgot your change!”. So, I take a kilogram of apples and head to the market to trade.

I bring them, haven’t even set out these bananas, right then an old lady runs up and buys all the peaches, and tells me to put them in a small bag! And I think, she’s totally insane, how am I supposed to put 20 watermelons into her bag?! I took the money and went home! Never went to the forest again… didn’t touch mushrooms… even quit smoking.

Decoding Insane Prices in the Art Market | November 20 2025, 19:03

Let’s be honest about the art market (and why the prices there are insane).

Actually, there’s no mystery to it. It works somewhat like NFTs, only with a longer history and a better reputation.

The scheme is simple:

You take an item that hasn’t been on the market in this form yet (a painting, sculpture, installation — doesn’t matter). You call it an “important artifact”. It helps if you have connections — galleries, auction houses, billionaire collectors. If you don’t have connections, then find someone who does and sell the cow to them. Since uniqueness is required, there will be no paintings of bears in a pine forest, no matter how brilliantly they are done. There will be something distinct.

The very notion of “this is a painting/sculpture” — is just a convenient formality. The main thing is that the object can be incorporated into the already established art trading system.

Art is such — one of the most convenient ways to “optimize” taxes and move large sums of money. Paid 18 million euros for someone else’s work, and then someone “on your side” bought some of your work for the same 18 million. Virtually no money was really lost (just taxes), and now in catalogs and rankings, two works are each priced at 18 million. The price can be pushed up by selling them cascadingly. Win-win. Auctions are just in on the deal. Further, if you donate this work to a museum for charity, you can even cut more taxes. But it can also be sold. And here’s why.

Currently, there are simply too many free funds in the world. The number of billionaires and their wealth is growing faster than the availability of truly rare assets (real estate, companies, gold, etc. have all been divided already).

Art is one of the few markets where “scarcity” can still be created literally out of nowhere.

If you have access to a hundred such wealthy simpletons and you can tell stories (“this is an investment for 20-30 years, it will only increase”), then selling is purely a technical matter. Two or three interested parties = bidding already starts, and already you see +50-100% to the price.

Over time, real cases appear: someone bought in 2000 for 2 million, sold in 2024 for 80 million.

These cases are used to convince the next buyers. New buyers with their money confirm and amplify these cases. The cycle is closed.

Result: the rise in prices in the top segment of art is directly tied to the increase in the number of super-rich and their capital. As soon as a serious global crisis occurs and the extra trillions stop being printed/earned, and the pyramid collapses, the market will very quickly show where there was real cultural value, and where it was just a beautiful financial scheme.

P.S. This doesn’t mean at all that all contemporary art is a bubble. There are works that are really important historically and culturally. It’s just that at the very top of the price pie, cultural value has long ceased to be the main driver.

But at the summit of Olympus of the most expensive paintings of classic genius solitaries, there will never be, because galleries and dealers need artists who can produce 20-50 works a year to satisfy demand, organize exhibitions in five capitals simultaneously, and maintain turnover. Artists like Lopez Garcia, Odd Nerdrum, or Ron Mueck make unique pieces that will become especially valuable only after the artist dies.

Lost in Translation: Modernizing Opera Subtitles | November 19 2025, 02:31

This must be about my tenth staging of Le Nozze di Figaro. And I still can’t understand why no one ever bothers to make modern, well-constructed subtitles instead of something that resembles a product of prehistoric “Google translate”. Every single line is translated from Italian in such a barbaric way that it’s about to make one’s eyes bleed. And for what reason? The Italian is certainly not modern either, but if you undertake to translate, then do so in a way that the meaning can be grasped within those tens of milliseconds when your eyes dart to the screen. Now, you land on a text that takes a minute to chew over… Every woman makes me change colour… Instead of make me blush or make me pale… If you are fain to dance… And all that stuff.

Samuel Morse: From Painter to Telegraph Pioneer | October 28 2025, 15:00

At the “Rzhipopisi” exhibition, a painting titled “Paris through the Eyes of Samuel Morse” was showcased. Essentially, dots and dashes—it sparked the idea for this post. Few know that Samuel Morse was actually an artist, and quite a decent one—check out a couple of his paintings attached to this post. But he was only “decent” by our standards—surrounded by many equally skilled artists, he considered himself a failure in this realm and devoted the second half of his life, 35 years, solely to the telegraph. (By the way, Hitler was also an artist, amateurishly decent, but more mediocre compared to Morse amidst his contemporaries, yet he ventured into politics). In the attached photos, there’s a painting with paintings. Its actual size is about two meters and among the paintings hanging there is even the Mona Lisa (La Joconde) by Leonardo da Vinci, which wasn’t valued back then as it is now. It mainly became famous after it was stolen from the Louvre, and then fervently searched for and found by the entire world.

By the way, Morse Code was not invented by Morse, but by Alfred Vail, his colleague—a fact Morse later repeatedly denied (while also attributing the invention of the telegraph itself to himself). In 1848, the Vail/Morse code was refined by the German Friedrich Gerke. The code, improved by Gerke, was used until new technologies came along.

(By the way, I don’t understand why it’s Morse and not Morz. He was American, and nobody ever called him Morse.)

Indeed, among people who were artists, about whom everyone has forgotten that they were artists because they remembered something else, it is worth mentioning besides Hitler, also Winston Churchill and George W. Bush Jr.

Revisiting the Sun: A New Invention in Art? | October 19 2025, 18:15

Interestingly, depicting the sun in a painting is a very recent invention. I haven’t seen a single painting in any museum where the sun is depicted above the horizon. Well, maybe with the exception of the Impressionists, Monet’s is very symbolic. In modern works, it appears more often. But in half, it’s a trace from a photograph.

Update: Turns out Aivazovsky has a lot of this. But he produced so many paintings in the studio with his students that it seems you can find any combination of little ships, waves, and sun.