Once upon a time I followed a path of links from one website to another and I stumbled upon an article in Washington Post. And I read it. I am not a very sensitive person (well, I am a man) but this article stirred a flurry of emotions in my heart. I cannot say that I dropped a tear but I was really deeply touched.

The article was not about the latest news (which are always bad and to which we are already numb) but about art and beauty. And what it means for us, humans. You can read the full text on Washington Post website but here is the condensed version.

Gene Weingarten, cultishly popular Washington Post journalist, has convinced world famous violinist Joshua Bell to conduct an experiment. On Friday morning, January 12 Joshua Bell put on some casual clothes and a baseball cap and showed up at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in the center of federal Washington. There he stood against the wall beside the trash basket, opened the case at his feet, shrewdly threw in some pocket change as a seed money, took his four million dollars Stradivarius violin and began to play. He started with Bach’s “Chaconne” which Joshua himself calls “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history.” After “Chaconne” followed Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and more and more…

Joshua’s Stradivarius was making out-of-this-world sounds which make even gray-hair men in packed concert halls cry. “Delicate urgency.” “Masterful intimacy.” “Unfailingly exquisite.” “A musical summit.” “. . . will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.” That is just a few critical acclaims to Joshua Bell’s latest album, “The Voice of the Violin”. So, you get the picture. The Washington Post was anticipating crowd control, traffic jams, police and tear gas. Not so fast…

The whole experiment was videotaped with a hidden camera and these are the cold facts: the performance lasted 43 minutes, the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by, 37 of them gave money, most of them on the run for a total of $32.17, only 5 slowed down to listen to the music and only one recognized Joshua. You can see the whole misery of ignorance for yourself in this video:

It is a very gloomy and disturbing picture. It makes you angry and sad to you see all these people passing by totally oblivious to the beauty of the sound they hear. Federal employees on their way to the boredom of their government jobs.

The title of Weingarten’s article reads “Pearls Before Breakfast”. The hidden message reverberates with proverb adapted from a saying of Jesus from the Gospels, “Cast not pearls before swine.” The full text from Matthew 7:6 sounds even more callous: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”

On the other hand, you keep asking yourself: would you have stopped in the same situation? Would you? Would I have stopped? Early morning, barely awake, late for work, making a mad dash to the gray warmth of your cubicle, feeling being utterly alone in a crowd, pounded with mechanical noise of the city… You close in and ignore your surroundings. Maybe…

But at the same time there were a lot of people there who did not rush anywhere. Just across Joshua and his violin there was “shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wall full of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal.” There were people standing and waiting in a lottery line looking for a long shot to get a lucky break. Just in a few feet from a treasure which they ignored. What do you make of that?..

What Gene himself has to say about his experiment? “Context matters” - he says - “Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.”

“Optimal,” Guyer said, “doesn’t mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don’t fit right.”

And that applies not only to music, but all arts including visual art.

Mark Leithauser is a senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that metro station.

“Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it’s one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: ‘Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.’”

Optimal viewing conditions, art in a frame, in a gallery, in a museum… Art labeled as “art”. By artist himself or even better by critics and art establishment… Doesn’t it lead us to the conclusion that art is a pure social construct? Art without frame: is it art?

Sergiy,

I truly appreciate your very honest and sincere comment to the previous entry in my blog. Not very often people talk and discuss such things as meaning of life. I started to write you an answer but it grew up in something bigger than a simply reply. I took a liberty of quoting your message and posting it along with my answer to you as separate entry in my blog. I hope it is ok with you. I believe these things are important and I don’t want them to get lost somewhere in comment archives.

Here it is:

I knew you were going there. All your recent posts showed it clearly and it was just a matter of time when the main question was going to be posted - the meaning of life. I bet everyone in their life has asked this question once and so have I. Sure enough; it was painful to find a satisfying answer. Nothing seems to be right or make sense at all. Then I figured that that was exactly the problem. Trying to find the reasoning, I mean. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? But it worked! Well, at least for me.

When one is looking for the answer to the meaning of life he or she is never searches for the answer to the meaning of death. Why, indeed? Death is the natural end of life. It’s clear and hence does not require an answer. Period. But is it really the answer? Does one really know what death is? You can’t really answer this question until you are there and when you are there you cannot communicate back to those who are alive. Meaning what? Meaning, we don’t ask ourselves this “meaningless” question and rather focus on searching the answer to the meaning of life instead.

If you are asking where the heck I am getting at, I tell you to the answer I found for myself, my friend. The meaning of life is merely life itself in its infinite variety of biological forms including us, human beings. It is as simple as it gets. I believe that the answer mustn’t be complicated. I think simplicity rules the Universe. One can like it or not, but on that scale nothing matters at all. All is everything and everything is all.

The Why we live is not a question to me, but the Why we think is. Human’s mind is the biggest mystery to us, life forms.

* * *

Same as you were I was searching for an ultimate answer to this ultimate question. And at age of sixteen or seventeen I came to a logical conclusion similar to yours but more “mathematically rational” in a sense: there is no answer since the question is stated incorrectly. It does not meaning that ultimate question to the meaning of life does not exists, nor does it exists for that matter. It only means that we are asking an improper question. It reminds me and old anecdote: An airplane pilot asks his navigator - “Course?” and navigator answers - “33!”, “What’s 33?”, asks the pilot and the navigator replies - “But what’s the course?”

The fascination I found in Viktor Frankl’s ideas is that he completely turned around tables on you. He writes:

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, rather must recognize that is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

What does it mean? It means that we should stop asking ultimate question of meaning of life but instead give answers since we are who being questioned. What questions you may ask? The questions we are faced every day, every hour. We may not even verbalize these questions, but they do exist. We, humans, are proud of the fact that we are the only beings on this planet who possess consciousness, free will. We make conscience decisions and actions every day, every hour. They constitute our life, our being.

Unlike an animal, man is no longer told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do… or he does what other people wish him to do…

So, the questions are: Why do you do what you do? What is the meaning of your daily conscience decisions and actions? What is the purpose? We have been told that we have a free will. But what is the meaning of things we are willing? What is that you want and WHY do you want it?

It may seem that we made a circle and we are back to the same old question about meaning of life. Not at all. There is a very distinct difference between an old search for ultimate question for meaning of life and answering questions about meaning that life asks you. The quest for meaning of life, if you dig deeper, refers to life as a fate, mission, or destiny, extrageneous and indifferent to you, your wills and desires. You must fulfill it. Period. It is forced upon you. There is no escape. It is like death. On other hand, being questioned by life is intimately personal and ultimately unique. It comes to a simple question: What is that I want in my life? And the question the life asks you in turn: Why? What is the meaning of it? Often we are lost to answer even to the first question. And sometimes it might take a lifetime to answer the second one…

That’s what I think about it…

What is it that you want? That is a simple question. What do you want in your life? Everyone has an angel behind his or her back waiting for you to spell out the answer to this question. He would be glad to listen to you and make you wish true, but what is it? Can you put it into words, in one simple sentence - what is it that you want?

You may start thinking about world peace or bringing back health to your loved ones. No. That is the God’s job, angels do miracles but little ones and they do it only for you. In fact they are not that powerful, they cannot do miracles in a finger snap, they need your help. They can guide you along the path, they can save you from falling into abyss, but you are the one who has to walk this path.

I guess that where the word happiness comes in. We all want to be happy. And we are not that original in that desire. Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women want happiness. But what is happiness? We all want health, beauty, money, power and million other things because we expect that it will make us happy. But even those who beautiful, rich and powerful are often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, that instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom. The thing is that they have not walked the path, they received all these gifts without even wanting them. We don’t value things that are easy to get or given to us as a by fortune or random chance.

You cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. The truth is that walking the path makes us happy. The path to the goal we set to ourselves answering a simple question - what is it that you want? You have to have a goal before you find the path. You have to have a desire to reach this goal and follow the path. But here is the secret of all secrets - there is no a direct route to your goal. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book “Man’s Search for Meaning“:

Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, for happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

… to be continued, hopefully

Once I had a chance to participate in online conversation with well-known Russian photographer Sergey Maximishin. The subject was on photographic composition. In short, Sergey’s point was that a good composition should have several visual attractors connected together in a closed loop forming some sort of polygon. Viewer’s attention moves from one visual attractor to another, but he is never forced away, outside the frame of the photograph. Moving in a closed loop visual perception works like a corkscrew following the spiral in deeper understanding and appreciation of the photograph.

In my photograph from Oia in Santorini I believe I constructed such a loop, a polygon: windmill, blue arch with a cross, following a rope from a bell you get to a blue vase, then cloth line with colorful red spreads swaying in a wind leads you to lower left corner from where your visual attention jumps back to the windmill. I think an integral part of this polygon is the rope from the bell to the blue vase. Otherwise horizontal lines formed by a structure of the building would have overpowered the composition.

On a personal note I don’t think that closed loop composition in a photograph works for me. I believe that we perceive pictures on a subconscious level in a split of second; the rest is just “an elaborate post-hoc rationalization” which we call consciousness. We think that we need time to understand the picture, go around it in a loop or a spiral when in fact we need time to rationalize our subconscious first impression of the picture. So, in my view my task as a photographer is produce photographs with “killer” compositions which are simple, powerful and bold. That kind of composition gives a “knockdown” to visual perception of a viewer. Later he may go in loops and spirals around my photograph but that is later, that is the next layer of visual perception. Ultimately a perfect photograph should be like a Newton’s apple which hits you in a head and which later could be slowly eaten satisfying your eyes with its round form and red and yellow color and your taste buds with its sweet zest. And hopefully that apple can open door for you to new ideas or powerful emotions.

I am not a very big movie fan. In fact I have never been to a movie theater since I cannot bear the smell of popcorn. Instead I have a small DVD collection of my favorite movies. I guess the definition of a good movie for me is the one which you can watch numerous times and every time you discover something new. Not very often I come across such movies. I believe I found another one. It is “Everything is Illuminated” directed by Liev Schreiber. I won’t tell you what this movie is about. You have to watch it. There is a website devoted to this film which I highly recommend as well - www.WhoIsAugustine.com.

It is not for everyone. First of all it is an independent movie, not a mainstream Hollywood. And only those who speak Russian can fully understand and appreciate it. There are a lot Russian conversation in this movie which is translated with subtitles but obviously they are far off.

The actors are brilliant. The main part is played by famous Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and many others). It is a debut for Eugene Hutz and he is incredible. He is better known as the singer, lyricist and visionary of the critically acclaimed gypsy punk rock band “Gogol Bordello“. Boris Leskin (Falcon and the Snowman, Men In Black and others) acted in over forty Russian films before immigrating to the United States where he made a carrier from a taxi cab driver to a Professor of Acting at New York University.

The film is an adaptation of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel “Everything is Illuminated“. The novel takes its title from a quote in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being“: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” The passage refers to the philosophical idea that the greatest tragedies in life can only be experienced to their fullest if we are able to relive them.

Recently I realized that I have tons of photographs which I think are not suitable to post on my website. I’m not talking about technical aspects of these photographs, they are fine. They are different than all photographs I have on my website. Different in subject matter. These are photographs of people. Humans are absent from my website photographs. At least as a main subject. I have photographs of apes on my website, but not humans. Isn’t it ironic? And on other hand I have thousands of photographs of people which hardly anybody sees. What do I do with them? They are not art and I have no intention to sell the prints alike my website photographs. Apparently I have two different bodies of work which almost never interfere with each other. Landscape and nature photography is flourishing and it is fully represented on my website. The other photography - people photography, social photography - hides in a closet. I have to invent something to show these photographs. Maybe within limits of this blog for now. We’ll see…

I don’t like an expression that an artist making art is expressing himself. I’m not sure where this notion, this meme came from. It implies that artist at his leisure time reflects on his mundane feelings and unconscious desires, conceives an elephant but gives birth to a mouse.

For me making art is duty. I feel that I must make at least one photograph a day, no matter how imperfect it can be. Otherwise I feel just plain bad. If I don’t do photography several days I even slide into a mild depression. Not making art is a sin. That’s how I feel about it.

Life is like crossing an ocean in a small boat with patched holes which constantly leak. Making art is a process of patching these holes and scooping leaked water out of your boat. Not making art means doing nothing about it, letting the water fill your boat until it sinks. Along with you.

I have to admit that I’m a big fan of Star Trek. Not the original Star Trek and not the latest series, but one and the only one - Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of the episodes features Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, and Dathon of the alien Tamarian race, played by Paul Winfield. Captain Picard is captured and then trapped on a planet together with Tamarian captain. They must learn to communicate with each other before the beast of the planet overwhelms them. The Tamarian language, although “translated” by universal translator device, is still unintelligible for Picard, because it is too deeply rooted in local Tamarian metaphors. Eventually Jean-Luc grasps the meaning of Tamarian metaphors and in the end he even enriched them with metaphors from Saga of Gilgamesh.

Enthusiastic Star Trek fans compiled the Damrok Dictionary which has Tamarian phrases like these:

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
dahr-MOCK juh-LAHD tuh-NAH-gruh
Friendship as a result of shared struggle

Kadir beneath Mo Moteh
kuh-DEER moe-moe-TAY
Failure

Mirab, his sails unfurled
mee-RAHB
Departure, “let’s go”

Sokath, his eyes open
soh-KAHTH
Realization, understanding, an epiphany

Temba, his arms wide
TEM-buh
Giving, receiving

I’m telling this story because I think that photography like Tamarian Dathon speaks metaphorical language quite frequently. Every photographic image has to be interpreted in context of culture, religion, history, in context of personal life of the photographer, his relationship with nature and people in his life. Every photograph carries a metaphor. Every photograph is a metaphor. Metaphors could be quite potent but often utterly meaningless to a viewer. In that case photograph fails its main function - to communicate (Kadir beneath Mo Moteh). Question: is it a failure of a photographer or a viewer? Or both? Photographer must try to understand the language of the viewer and vise versa. Photographer should try to speak universal language of art showing a path to his cultural or personal metaphors. And viewer should be visually educated, be ready to accept the path. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

The Chinese character for love - decoding character from top to bottom: That which gives breath (”spirit”) to the heart, with a graceful motion Rose Quong Chinese Characters: Their Wit and Wisdom

One day several years ago sitting a car at the red light I had a revelation. It was about love. I was given a mission in life: to bring more love to this world with my photography. It is not love between man and woman, it is not a relationship love, no. It is more like love from heaven: bliss-like state, Zen. We all live our busy lives, overwhelmed with our daily problems, job, family. We think that it is all important. And it is. But deep inside we know there is something even more important. It is simple, yet very powerful. And it is so silly that we tend to ignore it. It is love. John Lennon was right: “All you need is love…”

Anyway, that is my purpose: make photographs that bring love. I am not the only one. There is an army of artists that constantly replenish a reservoir of positive energy in this world. And I don’t believe that there is another army pumping reservoir of negative energy. No. There is just a drain hole of ignorance…

I think about art and photography all the time. I wake up in the morning with ideas in my head I went to sleep with. I perfect the craft of photography every day. I travel to remote places where air is pure and sweet to feed from the primordial spring of unspoiled landscape. And even though most of my work is landscape photography it is not all about nature and landscape. I don’t mean to offer dream escape for city dwellers (and I’m one of them). I don’t mean to mimic other landscape photographers whom a plenty. I offer not landscape, nor nature, but my interpretation of it, my conscience, my view. There is a saying that viewfinder of the camera is pointed not outside, but inside. My view is limited but it is unique and that is the gift I was given, that is what I have.

I need your help. Make it happen. I can do only half of my job, my mission: make photographs. Your choice is to do another half: look at them. That’s where the mystery happens and message of love is been sent and received. I just cannot do it alone…