Erisava

Vahid Dastpak

About this app

Question Art.

Art has always spoken to us. But talking back to it, in public, has largely belonged to art-world professionals — not to the audience most work is actually made for.

Erisava is a relaxed space to change that: talk back to artwork you've come across, with your own honest, unfiltered take.

You encounter an artwork — browsing Erisava's own curated collection, standing in front of it in a museum or gallery, or coming across it on Wikipedia or a museum's own page. Something about it lingers: a thought, a question, a doubt, a flicker of wonder. You share it, opening with that — a line, a yes/no, an open question. Then everyone else answers honestly too: pick an option, or say it in their own words — short is fine, honest is what counts. Just your own reaction to the thing in front of you, shared plainly alongside everyone else having theirs.

The feed itself spans art history's icons and its stranger corners alike — famous portraits, forgotten oddities, unsettling masterpieces — each with real context on where it came from and what it's doing there. Beyond it, you can:
- Follow artists whose work keeps catching your eye
- Favourite the pieces and discussions you want to find again
- Comment and see what other people made of the same work
- Get notified when someone responds to your take
- Post your own finds from out in the world, linked back to where they can be seen

Erisava sits in a gap that's mostly gone unfilled. Academic and professional art discourse speaks in a register most people don't have and don't especially want. Opinionated forums and threads are largely the turf of critics and critics-in-waiting. Social media flattens a real encounter down to a single silent tap. Occasional museum surveys ask about the visit, not the individual work. Gallery guestbooks, where they exist, are rarely public, mostly one-way, and tend toward the flattering. And the museum or gallery itself — where most people meet the work in person — keeps no record of that meeting beyond a ticket sold and a body added to the crowd count. Erisava is a place for what nobody else is really capturing: the plain, first-hand experience of the person who was actually standing in front of the thing.

That's where the name comes from too: it joins Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, with ava, the Persian word for voice — a voice for discord. Eris wasn't invited to the party, so she came anyway. This is that same door propped open: making room for the audience to express their impressions, questions, doubts, thoughts, casual remarks, and disagreements. None of this claims the audience reads a painting better than the critic or the curator does — that was never the point.

Questioning and scrutinizing what's in front of you is one of the most effective ways to learn about it — more so than passively absorbing an art history book, a museum catalogue, or a wall label and taking it at face value. Education isn't the main point here, but we hope this encourages exactly that: asking aloud whatever comes to mind, even standing in front of something grand, mysterious, or overwhelming, without worrying it could make one look foolish.

It runs the other way too. Artists and art professionals get something they rarely see for themselves: what today's audience makes of art, old and new alike — not filtered through a critic, a curator, or a survey question about the visit.

What’s new

This is Erisava's first release. Encounter a work, share your honest take, and see what everyone else made of it.