The Well-Tempered Clavier 2011

Curator: Look at the raw energy crackling off this canvas! Alexander Roitburd's "The Well-Tempered Clavier," painted in 2011 with acrylics, just vibrates with a frenetic joy. It feels like a punk rock orchestra tuning up backstage, all wild abandon. What grabs you first? Editor: It’s this clash, isn’t it? The recognizable forms, almost Renaissance in their posing – the lute player, the violinist – submerged within a chaotic, scribbled overlay. The black background intensifies that dichotomy. I find myself strangely unsettled by the whole thing. Curator: Exactly! It's like Roitburd's riffing on the old masters, giving them a jolt of 21st-century anxiety and wit. Those swirling lines almost mimic musical notations but they are, you're right, unsettling... defacing even, while also amplifying the drama. I feel like there's a social commentary bubbling beneath, something about the perceived timelessness of classical ideals meeting the messy realities of our era. Editor: I can see that reading. Perhaps he is considering the museum’s own role? Positioning itself between high culture, that perceived “timelessness,” and the vernacular, almost childish scribbles, disrupting such notions. I also see the figures looking in different directions: that increases a feeling of disjunction for me, a type of chaotic imbalance where nothing will ever feel right. Curator: That's brilliant. Their disconnection! A Renaissance tableau, but fractured, yearning... And, to your museum point, doesn't the title suggest the kind of "ordering" we impose through collections, when really art – life – is inherently a little more off-kilter, as we find it? He's saying to me “Smash the glass; this isn’t your granny’s baroque art!”. It’s exhilarating. Editor: I agree the subversion is quite thrilling. Even in art history, the "canon" is always being challenged. Perhaps that’s what makes "The Well-Tempered Clavier" such a resonant statement, echoing through time and galleries and raising more questions than answers. It is the role of art institutions, after all, to embrace the disruptions too, no? Curator: Precisely, a perfect harmony – or disharmony – of the ages! And that, ultimately, is its enduring appeal: a vibrant argument captured in acrylics, insisting that art, like life, never stays politely within the lines.