Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method is described as the “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” It sounds like drugs were involved.

I understand the definition about as well as I do the paintings themselves, like that his William Tell is really Vladimir Lenin. And his melting clocks are the “camembert of time”, “symbols for the lack of meaning and fluidity of time in the dream world.” Sounds like Einstein meets Freud meets Nietzsche and results in a Julia Child four-dimensional soufflé with an Oedipus complex.

Cheese is a common theme at the exhibit, as the Venus de Milo in Drawers (not in the sense of pants) is accompanied by the story of Dali’s first meeting Harpo Marx, who at the time was naked in a garden feeding a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese (don’t know if it was camembert) to a swan. Sounds like more drugs were involved.

But the painting that grabbed my attention was Mae West’s Face Which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, and not just for the missing comma after Face.

The Supreme Court is about decide a case appealed from a 2021 judgement declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate Lynn Goldsmith’s photo of Prince. If the Andy Warhol Foundation loses, the Mae West painting, which was based on a film ad, may, if permission was not granted at the time, be one of many museum pieces of art to fall like dominos if considered derivative, rather than transformative, a legal distinction unrelated to robots that can change their shapes.