“The Importance of Boredom in Art and the Future of Contemporary Art: An Interview with a Long-Time Director General of the National Gallery”

You don’t seem like someone who likes to be bored.

And that’s my fault too. Boredom is necessary for life. People who can’t be bored are unbearable.

What is boredom in art for you?

I’m bored with all contemporary art.

With each new generation, do you see hope for art to survive?

Art is not meant to survive! There are too many of them. At the same time, art cannot be banned, but it is important to create some obstacle that would eliminate art a little. That might be the way to his rediscovery.

What obstacles do you set for yourself as an artist?

It is the same as a parent teaching their child to overcome obstacles. You have to try to accept those aspects of life that are difficult and unpleasant, because they are also part of life. Life is a scrum of things of varying quality. And you have to deal with them somehow. Even boredom, which is so unpleasant, is a natural part of life and needs attention.

You are skeptical of contemporary art, you don’t hide it. What could move him?

I cannot imagine how life itself will continue, therefore I cannot imagine how art itself will or will not continue. Art is a magical part of life directly dependent on it and brings something that ordinary life does not have. Something like a piece of God in each of us. Even though I am an atheist, I perceive God as an entity that is unknown to us, that is above us and we do not know what it is like or if it even exists. So when I don’t know what life will be like, art seems to me to be irrelevant.

Although the title of the exhibition is striking, it does not reveal much about who is exhibiting with whom. How is it?

My students and I are exhibiting, i.e. the people with whom my life is connected. More than what they do individually, it is what they do together that makes sense. The exhibition tries to find something that connects these artists. Together they try to move something forward, to give art some meaning.

What did you choose from your work for the exhibition?

I exhibit ironic coloring pages for the next generation of people who have incredible and unnameable genders and who do unnameable things. I brought a list of about 52 genders with me, but there are more. I consider the whole gender circus to be humorous literature. I hope it’s just a fad that will pass in twenty years.

On more things together. I write a lot. I’m less mobile, I’ve had cancer, so I’m a bit weak. I publish self-published books, which I print myself for twenty friends.

About the world through my eyes. It’s an old guy’s memories.

As the long-time director general of the National Gallery, you certainly follow the situation surrounding this key institution.

Of course there is.

I like the National Gallery as such. It still has meaning because it reconciles us to where we live, where we were born or where we spend time. And that’s what I think is important. But the gallery does not fulfill this at all. It is not even the Czech National Gallery anymore, but the National Gallery Prague.

Nothing is happening there! No interesting exhibitions or studies. The National Gallery is not here to discover new things in art, it is here to explore what exists, to collect. They do not complete these tasks at all. She is not even talked about much. I guess people don’t care.

Current boss Alicja Knast has been facing criticism from many quarters for months.

People ask me where the gallery is, what happened to it. It isn’t. She disappeared. I’m a little sorry.