Chanel, Duchamp, Giovanni Bellini, Cattelan, urinals and deckchairs to experience the WOW effect.
The Wow effect, the one needed to get exclamations of surprise out of people, can be lived in a thousand ways: for example, seeing natural events, attending art exhibitions, visiting a museum, leafing through an interesting fashion magazine. We like to think about them, mention them, for this reason we wish to propose some of them, continuing later with others, equally fascinating and challenging.
Wow No. 1. Take, for example, the largest deckchair in the world, finished on the first page of the Telegraph: 8.5 meters high and 5.5 meters wide, weighing 6 T, where T stands for tons, twice as high as a double-decker buses, built by the Scottish sculptor Stuart Murdoch. For the record, the sitting is made of red and white striped canvas.
For the Wow No. 2, we find it hard not to think of the Finger by Maurizio Cattelan: deliciously erect and upright, a majestic, provocative, phallic, marble sign that unbalances our age-old moral equilibrium. There was a general outcry and there were those, like us, who defended the work, but that's another story.
The Wow No. 3 of 6, leads us to New York in 1917, mingled with the artists of the Society of Independent Artists who refused to exhibit the readymade work R Mutt. It was a resounding Wow! Screams, cries, moans, gasps, shocked and dazed looks. At the centre of the room, for a few minutes, it was placed a white, smooth and shiny urinal. A real used urinal, taken off the wall of a public Vespasian in Montparnasse. Subtitle of the work by Marcel Duchamp: Fountain. A resounding, temporary artistic failure: there is now no American museum that does not have a copy of R Mutt.
Wow No. 4: Marina Abramovich, Dragon Heads, 1990. The artist is sitting motionless on a chair, surrounded by a circle of ice blocks with 5 pythons resting on her body; they are 2, 3 and 4 meters long and have not been fed for two weeks before the performance. The pythons move around the body of the artist Marina Abramovich: Wow No. 4.
Silence, Action! You have lived the Wow No. 5 too, while flipping through any fashion magazine, some time ago; a double-page Chanel advertisement that featured beautiful, unreachable, ethereal, fragrant and universal women, to give life and colour to the Dream of Constantine by Piero della Francesca. Same setting, same attitudes and scenery. A due homage to the prominent master from Arezzo and the joy of a long Wow for us.
The Wow No. 6, the last one, was painted in Venice in 1515 by Giovanni Bellini: Naked Woman in the mirror. And we are left speechless, mouth wide open, and if someone reminds us that the author was born in Venice in 1433, we are completely stunned: 82. Giovanni Bellini painted the picture when he was 82: his last work is a hymn to beauty, sweet sensuality, feminine enchantment, and our knees bend, making us lose the sense of height.
Now, burdened by enthusiasm, we retreat in good order. See you soon!
