It was a magical journey into the world of modern art full of mysteries and love to actual societal crafts but not high end abstract. The journey into the art by Michael Kimmelman who is an influential force in contemporary art with his Pulitzer Prize nominated book “The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa” was marvelous.

First of all the pre-story was really funny. I had to visit Mr. Kimmelman’s master class at 19:00 yesterday. I took my time to get prepared for this so, as always, I got there quite late. At the box office they said that all tickets had been sold by yesterday and all what I said was – “oo, yeah, our friends should be inside with our tickets”. So after two ticket checkers believing in this lie, I went to the hall, where I found more administrative staff saying, “No entrance after start”. I had to stay at the door because of this and after all I had to listen to the master class in a distance and at wrong angle. After a while administration thought that eventually it was better to let us in – so when they stopped fighting I went inside.

Master Class

According to Mr. Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, studying art ‘provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully’ so, those who devote themselves to art do make their lives full. Living, according to him, can be a ‘daily masterpiece’ for each of us – we need to be a technical genius like Picasso to be able to live our lives artistically. One of Kimmelman’s examples is the dentist Hugh Francis Hicks, whose home was a makeshift light-bulb museum (with more than 75,000 light-bulbs in his collection of all times, from different places and devices). This is not a mere enthusiasm, but rather an abiding love that turned his interest into a matter of art.

One of Kimmelman’s intentions for master class, which he had achieved, was not to confront or approach art from the standpoint of an art critic, an art historian, or even as a professional artist, but rather as an amateur. Thus, Kimmelman presented ideas that were completely accessible to those with no particular education or background in the visual arts, but rather for those who can nonetheless come to appreciate more fully and profoundly the impact of art on those who are engaged in it. “Art touches the soul in ways that no other healing force can do” Mr. Kimmelman stated.

Question

Kimmelman’s passion for art and artists, a term that can be broadly defined to include the amateur pianists who turned up in Vienna for a competition and the light-bulb collector in London in addition to major figures such as Cezanne, Duchamp and Monet, is very apparent on the pages of this book. One reviewer called this a page-turner, and I must agree. I haven’t had the chance to get the book on the way so when everyone was waiting for signature – I was waiting with visit cards.

• - Oh, hi. I haven’t got chance to get the book for signature, but couldn’t lose the chance to ask question from The Art Expert!
• - Sure, no problem” he said.
• - We are developing project to promote Armenian Artists worldwide and I would like to know if we are on right way. We are presenting and promoting them in the way, not taking out them from context, from common ground of culture they have been grown without having pressure on the society. We are promoting them as Armenian Art with the slogan “Armenian Art Revealed”. What do you think, will the western society accept this kind of positioning or is it better to find other ways?
• “Well, this is a difficult question,” he said. In different cultures people perceive art differently and mainly they don’t think about culture or place. Instead there is a huge Armenian community worldwide that would love your strategy. Otherwise you might need to look a bit deeper into the strategy of art popularization and try to make focus on more tangible things.

That was what we were really searching for long time. We have started ArArt Project but none of us knew if we were on the right track. So we will undoubtedly take our chance. Eventually we are promoting each artists’ art as creative and as unique as it is. We haven’t lost anything, however, now we will just focuse on things which matter most. The good art should be selling itself from some time after initial push. Eventually, “the day of looking at bad art can be long and dark…” Michael Kimmelman’s quote would turn real values into real joy of natural art.

- Albert