Evgeny I. Kononenko

"The Pharaohs' Golden Parade" is a colorful large-scale performance organized in Cairo in 2021; its "plot" was the movement of the mummies of Egyptian rulers from the old Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square to the new building of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat district. This event is rightly regarded as a spectacular tourist attraction and another exploitation of the "image of Ancient Egypt" as a replicated cultural brand; but at the same time, the organizers made perhaps the most serious attempt to date to reconstruct an ancient funeral ritual, demonstrating respect for the memory of their ancestors. Despite all the "glossyness" of the festival, a number of elements of the performance turn out to be well thought out and originally designed in accordance with scientific knowledge about the fundamental foundations of Ancient Egyptian civilization.

Such a change in the axiological status of objects from "museum artifacts" to "an object of national pride", necessarily framed as a kind of initiation, is accompanied by a demonstration to the outside world of respect for one's cultural heritage, which is recognized and presented as part of contemporary cultural strategy and state ideology.

This same demonstration is perceived as an act of political rhetoric, proclaiming the continuity of modern Egypt in the chain of civilizations of the Nile Valley and the state's concern for the formation of cultural memory.

Studying a work of art is traditionally considered as an act of communication aimed at extracting some information — a message. However, the ‘communication’ with a piece of art has limitations, as the researcher does not communicate anything to the artwork. However, while interpreting the received message the scholar adds new meanings to it, and at the same time serves as a medium, transmitting both the well-received message and their interpretation to a third party in another act of communication (for example, to the reader of a scientific paper). The article explores some natural prerequisites and constraints of both ‘communication’ with a piece of art and the message we receive, which arise from two factors: what we know about the artwork (metaknowledge) and how accurate this knowledge is. The paper provides vivid examples to illustrate the mistakes caused by disregarding the work of art as a source of information. Notably, the roots of such mistakes not infrequently stem from the researcher’s biases rather than the characteristics of the artwork itself. Quite often the challenges posed by such ‘communication limitations’ cannot be overcome, while these limitations cannot be ignored; the researcher could only accept their existing. Additionally, the author demonstrates the technique of “in terviewing” a piece of art, emphasizing the need to reassess the primarily obtained information about the object.

This article continues its examination of the relationship between subject and object of research in art studies. Revisiting ideas about the object within the context of metaknowledge is particularly relevant given the debate about the crisis of art studies, the constant recourse of researchers to a limited number of works, and the creation of an entire “information field” around them, represented by several concentric “zones of distancing” determined by the quantity and quality of intermediate sources of inferential judgments. In “zone A” the primary source is the immediate object (the work), in “zone B” it is replaced by a judgment about the object, in “zone C” an interpretation of the interpretation occurs.

The situation becomes more complicated in comparative studies, when the subject deals with several objects and is forced to use sources located in different qualitative zones of several information fields that overlap each other.

Attention is drawn to the change in research optics as we distance ourselves from the primary source and replace direct study of the object with reliance on information obtained from indirect sources and often distorted.

As a result, the level of verifiability and reproducibility of research is declining to critical levels. Specific examples demonstrate the “loss of fact” and the emergence of pseudoscientific concepts unsupported by scientific knowledge.