What would the world be like without The Guggenheim? Or the Pompidou? Art history, the canon, tourism—all things culture would have an irreversible scar. Ukranian photographers Vitaliy and Elena Vasilieva have imagined such a world with their photo series Apocalypse in Art, which depicts some of the most iconic art institutions right as apocalpytic phenomena—sandstorms, vast floods, and ominous storms—are about to strike the museums into oblivion.
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In a lengthy invective against today's state of the arts, the Vasilieva sisters write, "Today we are witnessing the collapse of the basic cultural patterns and mechanisms that determine a spiritual and material civilization over the last century…Spirit of apocalypses holds sway over modern culture and slowly infecting everything around. How will this virus affect art? Will there still be a place for an art in society?"Though nihilistic, the arresting images do spark some interesting thoughts about what a cultural apocalypse would look like, especially since they're digital photos. As museums, universities, and other cultural resources topple, would the Internet become the premier haven for arts preservation? Could art institutions persist without any physicality?"So how art is going to exist now? In what way it will be expressed?" ask the photographers. "We have to be objective and accept that old institutes and cultural models are being destroyed by new, still not quite clear, but obviously other worlds."The artists assert that we can't stop this apocalypse, as people have "lost the ability to create." To them, the cataclysm is already in full swing. "All [people] can really do is to seek and fix." Let's hope they're not right.
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