12/09/2025
The White Sheet Series: The K**a Project — Bridging the Gap Between Art and People
White Sheet 1: The White Canvas
Imagine a white sheet of paper or a blank canvas. One person will glance at it and look away. Another will think of snow. A third will see the slope of a mountain they climbed last summer. Someone might want to write a poem on it or draw something. But most will just walk past.
Yet, this could be Kazimir Malevich's "White on White", Robert Rauschenberg's "White Painting" from his iconic series, or Yves Klein's "IKB 191". It could be a work by Piero Manzoni and his passion for provocation. Worth millions.
The point is, a white sheet or canvas can express spirituality, reflect the world, or symbolize infinity—or it can be a biting protest in the language of art. But to an unprepared viewer, it means nothing. It’s a miss. A miss for everyone, including art lovers, unless driven by pride and the desire to possess what others do not. That passion, it seems to me, has little to do with art itself. It is a passion for owning art, not for creating it. Although collectors remain one of the key supporters of artists.
In everyday life, people use arithmetic; in salons, algebra; but some speak the language of geometry. Try an experiment: ask your friends to prove the Pythagorean theorem. Ponder the result...
Not long ago, an artist took a blank sheet or canvas and filled it with a landscape, still life, or portrait. The main task was to depict reality, and the main criterion was likeness—whether of a royal figure or a everyday scene. Today, the vast majority of viewers use a similar approach, but this task is now more than successfully handled by photography and already by AI.
Does this mean painting is dying?
I am sure it is not. Because painting has tools inaccessible to photography, even with Photoshop and its array of tricks. First, there are the paints and techniques: watercolor, oil, acrylic, pastel, synthetic polymers. Painters use coffee, wine, ordinary salt, and sand. You can paint with anything, on anything.
But the main difference and advantage of the painter is that they create the image themselves, guided by their own fantasies, memories, or impressions. A photo artist, despite all the tricks and techniques, remains a capturer of the visible, the momentary. They can pour part of their soul into the image, but they cannot fully escape reality. They are tied to the object, the background, compositionally limited. Using digital technologies in photography is merely transforming a photographic image—like applying makeup.
There is no competition between painting and photography. Photography is more understandable, accessible, and therefore more attractive to today's viewer. The wider audience is simply unfamiliar with contemporary painting and shows little interest in it. This is a great mistake. And it’s not about gasping in awe at Kandinsky or Dali. We are losing the ability to perceive a craft honed over millennia to develop relationships, spiritual growth, and form the very concept of art and human imaginative thinking.
White Sheet 2: The Literacy of Seeing
To build relationships, you must first understand why they are the way they are now and whether they are needed in the future.
Three hundred years ago, in the transitional era from Baroque to Rococo, literacy was not the norm but a privilege. Only 10-15% of the world's population could read and write. It’s obvious who these people were: the high nobility, merchants, artisans. There was also a gender gap. For peasants, literacy was simply not a necessary part of life. Religious peculiarities also played a role. Literacy was higher among Protestants, for instance, as personal Bible reading was encouraged.
The turn from the 19th to the 20th century was a period of growing compulsory primary education. As a result, global literacy reached 30-40%, albeit unevenly distributed across continents, which is understandable.
Today, literacy is a fundamental human right, standing at 86% for the population over 15. So what does this have to do with painting? The number of people who actively visit exhibitions and show an interest in painting is estimated at just 10-15%. This is comparable to literacy rates in the 18th century—a transitional time for visual art. True professional connoisseurs (including artists, art historians, critics, gallerists) make up just 1-3%.
The presence of painting enthusiasts in modern society can be estimated at a modest 10-20%, while up to 50% of people are not interested in this art at all. These are approximate figures.
Don’t assume all Harvard graduates are inevitably fascinated by painting. It’s far from that clear-cut. Although great scientists had their affinities. Niels Bohr had a vivid example of Cubism hanging in his office—Jean Metzinger's "Woman on a Horse." According to the scientist, it resonated with his approaches in quantum mechanics, dealing with multiple viewpoints of an object simultaneously.
A factor in the lack of interest in painting is the consumerist attitude of modern people towards the world and events. Modern gadgets, appliances, and means of transport are more important. People react to the design of these objects, the architecture of their environment, and advertising. Painting is off to the side; there’s simply no time or need to reach for it. And those involved in painting often prefer to "huddle together," maintaining a sense of elitism behind gallery walls, auctions, and specialized events. Roughly estimated, there are only about 6.25 exhibitions per year for every 100,000 people on Earth. But more on that next time.
For now, a preliminary conclusion: most modern people feel no need for close engagement with painting, which lies outside their consumer interests. The gap persists and even grows due to a lack of knowledge about the causes, laws, and trends in the development of contemporary painting on one side, and the relentless, commercially driven searches of artists on the other. This refers exclusively to the Western European tradition, regardless of the artists' ethnic or national belonging. The technological development of reproduction means has devalued the original in the eyes of the viewer and consumer, especially given the price difference.
White Sheet 3: At the Crossroads
So, we've concluded that the broad masses lack an active interest in painting. I want to emphasize that this is caused by consumer habits. But there are other weighty reasons. They lie in the attitude of the authors themselves towards the external environment.
Today, practitioners of painting stand at a crossroads, even though at the turn of the 20th century, as if foreseeing the coming digitalization and computerization, they rushed into the whirlpool of Modernism and its radical manifestation—Avant-gardism. The goals, however, were different. Modernists created a new classicism; avant-gardists destroyed and changed everything possible and impossible.
The Avant-garde is a revolutionary denial of the past: "we will destroy the whole world of violence," with scandal, noise, and clamor. The weapons of the avant-garde are shock and provocation; it is a new language of painting with different approaches and goals that may be incomprehensible to the viewer.
• Cubism, in the persons of Picasso, Georges Braque, and their followers, revolutionized the understanding of form.
• Futurism, with Marinetti and Boccioni and comrades, who called for the destruction of museums.
• Nihilists led by Duchamp, Tzara, and Höch, who mocked everything using anything at hand, including a urinal (the famous Duchamp's "Fountain"). They went down in history as Dadaists.
• Surrealists (Dalí, Miró) — enough has been said and written about them.
• Suprematists (Malevich, Rodchenko, Tatlin) — who looked into the microscope of Tachisme.
• Abstract Expressionists (Po***ck, de Kooning) who also contributed their share to the revolution.
These are just the key movements; one cannot count them all, there were and are multitudes, like pilot fish accompanying the white shark in the ocean of Modernism, which influenced literature, architecture, industrial design, and other aspects of human activity.
The balanced transformers and creators of modern art can be called:
• Henri Matisse, a proponent of balancing form with color, who compared art to a comfortable armchair for the mind. Matisse thought through and comprehended reality.
• Paul Klee, the philosopher of Modernism, embodying in modernism both abstraction and figuration, working with color, systematics, and precision of the entire image. His works possess musical harmony.
• Piet Mondrian, the creator of Neoplasticism, mathematically verified harmony, who considered art the quintessence of order. The complete opposite of Dalí and Duchamp.
But both are bewildered at the crossroads. The question is not what to do, but how to be.
The creators abandoned their bewildered viewer, turning their attention to those who monetize their creativity—the consumer. To be precise, creators were surrounded by art world figures, and their work determines whether an artist becomes famous, known, popular, and, most importantly, "marketable." The latter, on one hand, enables creativity but, on the other, brings a capricious Muse capable of destroying the creative atmosphere.
Today, we see an unprecedented commercialization of art and the introversion of artists unwilling to step beyond the bounds of creativity. The path in art is now determined and indicated by a guide. This is the result of revolution in art, economics, technology, and a dead end in social development. In a word—a crossroads.
White Sheet 4: The K**a Project — Our Platform
The launchpad is defined.
The Problems We Solve:
➢ Low public interest in author's painting due to a lack of understanding of its trends and development. The K**a Project solves this by creating a network of outdoor interactive exhibitions, displaying high-quality digital reproductions on terminals, where viewers receive necessary information and expert commentary through interaction with AI.
➢ Consumerist attitude, influenced by the economic situation.
➢ The artist's dependence on their surroundings and opportunities to showcase their work. The K**a Project gives artists the chance to exhibit their works in personal, collective, and thematic exhibitions with minimal administrative control and formalities. Exhibitions are held directly in the urban environment, in places convenient for viewers and conducive to viewing.
➢ The disconnect between creator and viewer, leading to isolation and "eternal searching." The exhibition terminals create conditions for dialogue between the viewer and the artist through leaving comments, ratings, and answering questions via AI. The artist receives statistical data from the terminals and the website.
The K**a Project Aims To:
✦ Attract audience attention to the works of local artists by placing accessible interactive terminals in convenient and familiar locations along city routes. We bring painting into the urban environment.
✦ Create conditions where anyone practicing or studying painting can show their work in their hometown, district, and other cities across the country. Everything is accessible. Participants receive a certificate and materials confirming authorship and copyright.
✦ Allow artists to create their own gallery on the project website for free, negotiate with buyers, conduct secure transactions, use DeepSeek AI services and their activity statistics, and chat with fans.
✦ Create a local community of artists and viewers for cultural and educational purposes, to increase viewer awareness and expand artists' creative opportunities.
✦ Increase the quantity and quality of exhibitions in the country.
✦ Spread the experience beyond Estonia.
The K**a Project is designed to support artists, open a path to traditional galleries for them, and, most importantly, enable them to speak with the viewer in a mutually understandable language.
Join the project! Tell your friends, acquaintances, and colleagues about it. Comment and share your opinions on the project page.
You can contribute your skills and knowledge to the project's realization: propose events and set tasks, participate in creating the project's ecosystem, write articles, and create discussions. You and your friends can sponsor the project, supporting artists financially.
The K**a Project is non-profit. Funding is planned through crowdfunding and sponsors. All information will be presented after the launch of the platform, which is currently in development.
Author of the project: Stanislav Tsoi.
