The Dali Museum, a grandiose hull of glass nodules and steel adjacent to a marina in St. Petersburg Florida. Only a few years old, the powers found it necessary to destroy the former Dali Museum in order to erect a new one, not for efficacy reasons but for aesthetics alone. Our friend Danielle with whom we were staying told us this trend is increasing along the waterfront to the point where locals have begun protesting the destruction and recreation of a shoreline site called The Pier, simply because some find it outdated, at the behest of taxpayer dollars and the possible malnourishment of the pelican population. Why fix what isn’t broken? Because we can afford it, goddamn it!
In the lobby of the museum sits a remake of Dali’s Rainy Taxi, which by the insertion of a dollar bill into a slot causes simulated rainwater to pour through the interior of the automobile, soaking both the molding mannequin in the backseat and the shark-headed chauffeur. The original exhibition included chicory plants and live snails which crawled across the plastic woman. Its pay-per-play remake did not.
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| Snails not included. |
As a tribute to the artist who was quoted once admitting a love for everything gilded and excessive, the institution exists solely to serve to the upwardly mobile their monthly helping of culture, celebrating the depraved opulence of the allotted few and not the collection of one of the greatest creative minds of the 20th century. It is, as with the yacht club or the golf club, a place to be seen and to socialize, a spot to nibble on cheese plates and sip $7 glasses of low-rung wine at the commissary and not to engage in a sensory experience with the present art. They are shopping, plugged in to their headsets, their faces saying “This one would look lovely in the pool house. Do you think they take checks?”
The appeal exists because Dali’s work is different enough to earn culture points but not outwardly shocking enough to spark real, introspective thought among these people, fighting their twanging discomfort in front of a wall-length portrait mocking the crucifixion of Christ or a topless portrait of his wife and muse Gala at the kitchen table. Anything more intense and they would barf into their Hermes handbags.
Their mentality is disturbingly appropriate as the collection itself began as one of the largest, private collections of the artists’ work in the United States, owned by a big-money couple from St. Petersburg who began collecting in 1943. The now amassed 1,500 works consist of still lifes of fruit bowls and landscapes of the artists’ hometown from his early art school days and the extravagant, absurd masterpieces he labored over in the final years of his life.
The art is exquisite and it is striking to see his works in person, many of them taking on varying shapes and meanings when viewed from different distances and angles. The motifs running throughout - the silhouette of the Venus de Milo, Gala, melting clocks and globes - are traceable when viewed as a massive, live portfolio, witnessing his transition from student to artist, discovering his sense of Surrealism around the time he met idol Pablo Picasso.
Migrating through the mingling browsers - if you have the stomach for snobbery - there’s something hysterical about people fantasizing about art they’ll never own or even really understand. They’re more interested in what’s in the gift shop and who’s at the snack bar, anyway. We cannot help but wonder what Dali would have thought of such a clash - the very people he sought to satirize and shake out of complacency, quietly gazing at his works as though they were at the Sistine Chapel. Would he love it? Would he hate it? The answer is not one or the other, nor does it lie somewhere in between. It is in fact a trick question: he would probably pull the fire alarm and wait outside to spray patrons with a hose.
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