Encounters at the A.I.-drenched Dalí museum
Come with me to St. Peterburg's most aesthetic experience...
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Thanks to rather freakish timing, I spent this past weekend out of the reach of the snowstorms in Tampa, where I was visiting my parents. Once we grew bored of sitting by the neighborhood pool (sorry!!), we decided to spend an afternoon at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, about an hour’s drive away. The museum’s permanent collection was housed in a funny, kind of cramped space that stuck out to me for the way it very much embraced AI and related techiness as complementary, if not superior, to the museum-going experience.
You could, for example, pick up a lobster phone and ask a Dalí voicebot questions. I asked where he was born, and the “artist” responded, “I emerged from the womb of time on May 11, 1904, an explosion of cosmic light in Figueres, where reality and fantasy entwine like the coils of a mystic serpent.” (A placard nearby advised me to check with a museum docent for details and accuracy.) Then there was a “Dream Tapestry” using DALL-E (lol) “to transform personal dreams into artistic visions” on a screen and “The Endless Garden,” an installation inviting you to “co-create a living dream garden” on a different screen; neither worked at the time I was there. You could also strap on a VR headset and explore a Dalí landscape; I watched some visitors do peer around what looked like a video game set in a desert. Every few feet, placards exhorted you to whip out your phone to unlock AR capabilities tied to several of the masterworks; the resulting load time made this unworkable.
At least the intentions made sense: What artist would better suit the aesthetic of hallucinatory AI than the Surrealist? I found it kind of annoying, but not any more annoying than the mustache sculpture on the terrace, or the way some of the placards tried to neatly impart a too-neat takeaway tidbit that bordered on asinine. (For the big Gala/Lincoln painting, the placard ended in bold and italicized font: Dali’s demonstration that we can see two things within the same shape is his greatest gift to us. Okay?) (But interestingly for this painting, the optical illusion became clearer if you looked at it with your phone camera.) If anything, the way these tools offered to visualize and Surreal-ize any pedestrian whim — to mediocre, or nonexistent results — only underscored the genius of a 20th-century Spaniard who painted humans stepping on raw meat and runny egg yolks that could be tied up with a string.
What was most evident was how the extra trimmings just felt so… effortful. I did not want to stand in line to try the VR (and I definitely did not want to stand for the immersive Dalí Alive 360 experience outside in a blow-up dome, at least not without some potent gummies). I could not even summon the nerve to be a little mischievous and find out what parental/content controls were in place on the lobster phone if I wanted, for example, to ask about Dalí’s sex life. Perhaps ironically for someone seeking a pretty smooth-brained experience, what turned out to be nicest about the museum and its permanent collection was that I could just sort of ping-pong around the dense, air-conditioned space, revisiting works three or four times each as I waited for my parents to finish (the case for bringing completists to a museum; they have to read everything).
In the end, I kept returning to the paintings from Dalí’s youth, which made up for their literalness with such palpable earnestness: his 14-year-old self’s Impressionist landscapes of the Mediterranean, a portrait of his aunt painted when the artist was 19 (you can see how he was already working out the basics of glassware, which are then on full display in the 1956 piece, “Nature Morte Vivante.”). I loved his bread still life the most (from age 22), which apparently Dalí painted as a kind of Vermeer-mode F.U. to his art school teachers. Again and again, I gravitated toward the painting to examine the pearly white folds of the tablecloth, the exact crosshatches of the basket, the snowy white inside of the bread that suggested either a sacred glow and/or a lack of familiarity with rendering crumb texture. The true passive experience of the entire afternoon, actually, required one to simply stand and look.
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The Dali Museum is a different plane of existence. It can be so cool/interesting and also weird/icky? I went with my parents when they dropped me off at college. We crashed a tour, and when the docent got to Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea, she started to tell the story behind the painting. She was saying, “You know, the model who posed for this painting wrote in to say she was driving down the St. Pete Bridge when she saw a billboard of the work and thought…” and a random older lady cut in to exclaim, “Talk about moon over Tampa Bay!” and so we all turned to look at her obvs because who is this lady? And the docent was like, you are so lucky! This is the model, and she happens to be visiting today! And then we had a little Q&A where she explained she was working as a waitress at The Plaza when she met Dali, who was allegedly like "You have the ass of my late wife, will you pose for me?" I still don’t know if that was real or not, but my dad bought a print of the piece and made the model old lady sign it.