Natalia Nosova

I’m in a museum

An art work is always a faithful
mirror image of the artist
and no one can use
it to mask his true character.
V. V. Stasov

The way society perceives the artist has been important in every culture. In Ancient Greece artistic talent was seen as a hindrance to the development of any citizen engaged in public affairs. Later there evolved a concept of the artist as a rebel and innovator who fought against dogma in the name of progress and new discoveries.

Today romanticism has lost its appeal. As a natural result of the evolution of modern art the artist is now a businessman and celebrity who ‘creates’ in collaboration with business partners, in this case gallery owners and curators, and manipulates a well organised team of assistants, i.e. managers, agents, engineers and production units. With the aid of computer technology this team facilitates the creative realisation of a vast number of people whose creativity is no longer defined by talent and inspiration, but in terms of the market economy and the imaginative idea as art project. A project whose goal is recognition expressed in the gratification of creative ambition, fame and, as a consequence, hard cash.

In my project I wanted to reduce this practice to absurdity by hanging my own self-portrait on the wall of a ‘museum’, thereby depriving artworks of meaning and appealing to my wounded vanity in a literal act of self-reproduction.

Natalia Nosova