Happy New Year!

Seasonal greetings to all my readers, friends, and even to over a thousand visitors who ended up on this blog googling “nude white women standing facing forward” (I hope antique Venuses you were likely to find here provided an adequate reference if not the desired thrills).

I wish you all a year full of creativity, new art finds, ancient art history revelations, and – to the “forward-looking” thousand of guests – to discover the “three quarters” angle.

I have seen precious little art and read nothing but labels since December, travelling through Geneva to the French Alps and lamenting global warming along the way. If you doubt it exists, go visit glaciers or rather places where glaciers used to be a mere decade ago.

In fact, Geneva should run a referendum of relegating December from winter to late summer.

It’s serene, green, and ticks life away as a $2m tourbillon watch locked in a safe deposit box in an underground bank vault. Geneva is great to visit if you need a few peaceful days, but many of its residents complain it becomes too peaceful in about two weeks of living there, when life starts resembling the said bank vault, but without the money being stacked high all around.

I am sure in terms of art Geneva could benefit from an injection of creative steroids. The only exhibition I enjoyed (out of the two I visited) was a tiny show of Apocalypse graphics in the Art and History Museum, where visitors were provided with magnifying glasses to see tiny details of the exhibits.

It helped me to find something new even among the images I had seen many times before, like Durer’s Adam and Eve of 1504:

No, it’s not the cat and mouse at the bottom. They are too obvious: one can miss neither them nor their metaphoric references.

My surprise was the bewildered goat at the top right corner that has climbed up a cliff and watches birds flying below, and the cunningly evil expression of the snake achieved by Durer’s endowing the snake with almost human eyelids.

Of course, as any large city, Geneva tries to compensate the lack of private art initiative with public spending. This Xmas it was running a festival of light installations by contemporary artists which I would totally miss were I not living right in front of one of them.

Sophie Guyot, an artist from Lausanne, converted Longemalle square into a garden of symbolic objects that would light up in the evening changing colour from white to red and providing the perfect photo opportunity for transit skiing enthusiasts:

She left the interpretation open: it can be flowers, animals, or even human organs. The latter must be addressed to those who have reviewed a Hannibal Lector movie recently, which I find slightly disturbing, given the generally festive time of the year.

Otherwise, it is just fun and a huge electricity bill.

But, despite the slow start, I hope 2016 will serve me with a healthy helping of great art, heaps of art history discoveries, and plenty of opportunities to write about it all.

Happy New Year and see you soon in this blog!

P.S. WordPress spellchecker insists on replacing “Durer” with “Durex” in a vain hope I would abandon art and move over to the more popular domain of erotic literature. Thank you, I’d rather stay with “ü”.