user: Alexander Melamidâs Art Healing Ministry in SoHo

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The conceptual artist Alexander Melamid has created a storefront clinic in SoHo where visitors will be "treated" through exposure to fine art.

The Russian-born artist Alexander Melamid is by nature an ironist, so adept at serving as his own straight man that it’s hard to tell how seriously he means to be taken. He may not know himself.

Mr. Melamid and Vitaly Komar, a fellow Russian émigré, were for years a highly visible Conceptual art duo in New York. They were known for monumental paintings, including one of Stalin killing himself in a New Jersey motel, in the style of Socialist Realism, and for teaching elephants in Thailand how to paint like Abstract Expressionists.

Their most famous project was probably “The People’s Choice,” in which they polled people about their preferences in art and determined that what everyone really wanted to look at was a landscape with lots of blue, some animals and a historical figure or two. A painting they did according to this recipe — the ideal painting for Americans, they maintained — featured George Washington and some present-day picnickers by a bucolic lake with a hippo in the background.

In 2003 Mr. Melamid and Mr. Komar parted ways, and since then Mr. Melamid, always the more outgoing, has been on his own. For a while he was painting large, Velázquez-like portraits of rappers and Russian oligarchs. His most recent project, though, is something called the Art Healing Ministry, a storefront clinic at 98 Thompson Street in SoHo, where people can come in by appointment and be treated, by means of exposure to fine art, for a variety of physical and psychological ailments.

According to labels on the wall, these include bulimia nervosa, angioedema and urticaria, premenstrual dysphoric disorder and benign prostatic hyperplasia. (Mr. Melamid loves medical terminology, he said, because it reminds him of art criticism.)

Various art-healing tchotckes are for sale: candles; shoe insoles printed with a van Gogh self-portrait; glass flasks for “charging” liquids with the emanations from paintings by Raphael, Botticelli, Picasso or Lichtenstein that have been reproduced on the inside of the glass; and prayer cards, one for Picasso, patron saint of motorists, and one for Georges Seurat, patron saint of clear, youthful, radiant skin. You can also arrange for a little robotlike gadget bearing reproductions of paintings by van Gogh and Warhol to visit your apartment and scuttle around on the floor for a while, ridding it of impurities.

“We all know the power of art, its power to galvanize, fortify, stimulate, rouse, soothe and enlighten,” Mr. Melamid wrote in a statement announcing the creation of his clinic. In person recently, he explained: “I was always told that art was good for me, but until recently I didn’t know what it was good for. What is good? What is good in the U.S.A. is health and health products.”

How the art-healing process works is not entirely clear, but it may involve invisible particles called creatons. “The creatons are everywhere, and they go into the human body,” said Mr. Melamid, who is small and animated and has a nimbus of white mad-scientist hair. “If the creatons are used properly and nicely, they can enhance your body functions. They will help you to live happier and will also get rid of impurities. They enter through your kundalini and also into your eyes.”

The clinic officially opens on Wednesday, but last week a middle-aged man complaining of work-related stress dropped by for a preview treatment. He looked warily at a vitrine displaying something called an “Art Infuser,” which appeared to be an old VHS tape connected to an enema bulb. But Mr. Melamid reassured him that rectal infusion was now obsolete and instead led him to the back of the clinic, to what looked like a dentist’s chair, with a computer screen and a small projection device.

While the patient reclined, Mr. Melamid sat in a chair under a portrait of himself and took notes on a clipboard. He wanted to know specifics about the patient’s malady, and about any museums he had visited recently. Told that the patient had been looking at a lot of Whistlers, he nodded and said, “Not enough masterpieces.”

After a moment, he said: “This anxiety of yours is a very typical problem of modern man. And woman. And everything in between. My function is to help you see the right things.”
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assistant: Alexander Melamidâs Art Healing Ministry opens on Wednesday in SoHo. Drop by, and let fine art ease your afflictions.