The forty-seventh video from the series "Short Monologues by Platon Rivellis on Photography and Art".

The imaginary museum - as André Malraux has named it - which each of us carries within, is composed of all the works of art that we have either experienced, seen, read about, or viewed on DVD or the internet. All these accumulated in our minds constitute our imaginary museum. It is a great privilege for people of our era, something that people before the age of digital technology and televisions did not have. This museum gradually transforms into our own personal museum, since from our imaginary museum we keep and choose those that speak to us, those that concern us. Thus, something that may be buried deep in time but still moves us today then concerns us and is part of our personal imaginary museum. Or, as Peter Brook said, contemporary is anything that grabs you by the throat. The way an artist expresses themselves is logically related to the customs of their time. Today's youth listen to different music, the man on the street uses a different language, and artists use different languages and mediums. However, these are only the external form of art. The essence, the content, always remains, eternally, the monopoly of the great artists and they move us. Therefore, obviously if Euripides speaks to us today about issues, problems, and feelings that concern us, he is ours, he is contemporary, but of course Euripides uses ancient Greek. However, if a contemporary of ours, a peer, uses modern Greek, but speaks to us about things that do not concern us or in a way that does not move us, then they are not our contemporary, they do not concern us, they are not part of our personal museum. Instead of dividing art into contemporary and old, instead of preferring the contemporary saying that it speaks about things that concern us because it is the same age as us, I would prefer to decide that we are interested in works that are significant, works that in each case speak to and concern us and that for us these are contemporary regardless of the era they were created in.