Can Art Heal/Make Us Whole Again? The Clinic is Open.

Ok, it's performance art, from Alexander Melamid, whom you might recall from when he worked with Vitaly Komar on performance works like the surveys they took from people leading to their versions of ideal paintings and many other well-known works. Since 2003, they parted ways, and Melamid went solo, doing Velazquez style paintings of rappers, but now he has opened a clinic: The Ministry of Art, a storefront clinic in Soho (NYC) where people come in and receive rather comical good-natured "treatments" and I have no doubt leave feeling better than when they came in.

The Clinic opens to the public today.

From the clinic...


"Each patient who visits the Art Healing Ministry Clinic will benefit from its personalized Five-Step Program based on the interplay of four Methods:

1. Art Evaluation
Which artistic masterpieces among the many are the best attuned to the psyche and able to penetrate the immune system and pervade the genomic make-up of an individual client? This question will be answered during the first 20-minute session, through the use of the latest digital and analog systems of image delivery, including projections, preprogrammed image displays, and other cutting-edge techniques. The works of Old Masters including Raphael and Leonardo and modern artists such as Picasso and Warhol will be projected on the client to test for compatibility.

2. Immersion in Art
Based on the analysis made during the first session, special programs will be developed using carefully chosen images from the exhaustive library of world art, with the aim of saturating the client with the most effective visual imagery. This is intended to produce a cleansing effect, washing out intellectual, environmental and genetic impurities either inherited or accumulated. At this point, “prescriptions Art Medicines” will be dispensed, ranging from targeted viewings of masterpieces at local and international museums to at-home visual exercises.

3. Art Rejuvenation
This session is devoted to one or two specific areas of the body, inundating the most responsive organs of the individual client with the images found to be the most beneficial in previous sessions. Full immersion treatments such as the Brancusi slimming visualization and the Seurat facial skin rejuvenation will be employed.

4. Art Maintenance
The arduous task of maintaining the effects of the treatment and the achieved equilibrium of the fully-cured elements, while repairing the still-weak and/or incurable elements of the client’s anatomy, will be the focus of this and subsequent sessions. This highly individualized process will be directed by the immediate needs of a particular client."

For the clinic site, see here: [Link]

Source Article: [Link]

All of this comes at somewhat reasonable prices, though I doubt your insurance will cover it ( the rejection letter could be a bit of performance art, too). My favorite therapy is the house call, wherein Melamid attaches a print of a famous work of art to a Roomba vac and lets it roam your living space, "cleansing the air". 

For several reasons, I think this may not be a long-lived thing, so if you're interested, make your appointment & book your flight soon...

--- Luis