Like most organizations today, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has a mission statement:

PAFA promotes the transformative power of art and art making.

It also has a vision statement, because (we must admit) the mission statement is not very specific:

PAFA will inspire the future of American art by creating, challenging, cultivating, and celebrating excellence in the fine arts.

Now here is your challenge: Given the current climate of thought in the art world, try to think of any plan, program, exhibition, or any other activity a museum and art school could engage in that would not satisfy one or both of these statements.

Drunken revelry in the hall of statuary—celebrates excellence in the fine arts and, depending on how drunk people get, may be considerably transformative.

Shooting paintballs at the eighteenth-century collection—challenges excellence in the fine arts and promotes the transformative power of art.

Blowing up three blocks of urban Philadelphia—as transformative as all get out, and there certainly are blocks of Philadelphia that would be rendered more artistically excellent by a giant explosion.

Even hanging old paintings on the wall and letting people look at them could conceivably be justified by both statements, as much as it might be frowned upon by true devotees of Art with a capital R.

No, Dr. Boli cannot think of a single thing the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts could do that could not be justified by its mission statement and vision statement, which he therefore must regard as perfect in their kind. He would be happy, however, if someone else could prove him wrong.

You have seen Le Sang d’un poète; you have perhaps devoured the works of James Whale, Federico Fellini, and Edward D. Wood, Jr.—but what do you know of Nazimova?

Actress, dancer, director, producer, artist, and genuine mystery woman in an age of would-be mystery women, Nazimova (or Alla Nazimova, but she usually went by the one name only) was a big star in 1922. By 1923, she was back to Broadway, having used up all her own money and the patience of her backers producing bizarre art films that no one would go to see—or in the case of this one, even distribute.

Salomé is a silent adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play by the same name. The look of the whole film was inspired by the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, although modern viewers are also likely to think of Dr. Seuss, especially in the costumes, designed by Natacha Rambova (Rudolph Valentino’s wife, but Nazimova’s “constant companion,” as they used to say in the gossip rags). Charles Bryant (Nazimova’s nominal husband) is the listed director, but Nazimova conceived the project, paid for the film, and was well known as the authority on set, director or no director.

What shall we say about this picture? It walks the knife edge between sublime art and risible pretension. If you have never seen it, then you have never seen anything remotely like it. Nothing is naturalistic: the actors move like dancers; the sets are abstract and very much show their derivation from Beardsley’s illustrations; the costumes are cartoonish. A Beardsleyesque moon makes such frequent appearances that it becomes a character itself. Nazimova as Salomé is an unforgettable experience; with stars in her hair, she moves like some unknown species of creature, not quite feline but not quite human. In short, the ideas of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley are filtered through the utter weirdness that was Nazimova. She was as bizarre in real life as she was on film, with a house that was like a set from a German Expressionist horror movie and an embarrassing habit of seducing Hollywood leading men’s wives—embarrassing, that is, to the men, though apparently not at all to Nazimova. You may suspect, on seeing Salomé, that Nazomova was not the only one in the film whose sexual orientation would have been considered unorthodox in 1923.

So if you are ready for five reels of utter strangeness, you can see the film below. Two versions can be found on Archive.org. This one is a reasonably clear print, with original (or restored) tinting, an effective modernist score played by a small orchestra, and German translations of the titles:

Here is another print, lower resolution, but with an interesting original score by Edward Boensnes, who makes a hobby of composing original scores for silent films: