The Russian-born artist Alexander Melamid is so adept at being an ironist that it’s hard to tell how seriously he means to be taken.

His most recent project is something called the Art Healing Ministry, in Manhattan’s SoHo district, where people can come in by appointment and be treated, by means of exposure to fine art.

Mr. Melamid and Vitaly Komar, a fellow Russian emigre, were known for monumental Conceptual paintings, including one of Stalin killing himself in a New Jersey motel, and for teaching elephants how to paint like Abstract Expressionists.

On his own since 2003, Mr. Melamid has been painting large, Velazquez- like portraits of rappers and Russian oligarchs.

At the Art Healing Ministry, various art-healing items are for sale, including candles, shoe insoles printed with a van Gogh self-portrait and prayer cards, one for Picasso, patron saint of motorists, and one for Georges Seurat, patron saint of clear, youthful, radiant skin.

“I was always told that art was good for me,” Mr. Melamid said, “but until recently I didn’t know what it was good for. What is good? What is good in the U.S.A. is health and health products.”

Recently, a middle-aged man complaining of work-related stress dropped by for a treatment. He looked warily at a vitrine displaying something called an “Art Infuser,” which appeared to be an old VHS tape connected to an enema bulb. But Mr. Melamid reassured him that rectal infusion was now obsolete and instead led him to the back of the clinic, to what looked like a dentist’s chair, with a computer screen and a small projection device.

While the patient reclined, Mr. Melamid clicked through a series of paintings on the small computer screen. He stopped at a Cezanne and said: “If you have hay fever, you go to see Claude Monet, that’s for sure. For your problem I would recommend Paul Cezanne. When you go to the museum, don’t look around much. Go direct to Paul Cezanne. It’s very powerful painting, but in a way it’s also pacifying.”

For some additional relief, Mr. Melamid zapped the patient right on the forehead with a projection of one of Modigliani’s reclining nudes.

Afterward the patient said he didn’t necessarily feel better, but he certainly felt no worse. Mr. Melamid added: “You understand this is not the full session,” explaining that a complete evaluation takes 20 minutes and costs $125.

“I’m not for money. I’m for health,” he said. “But I have to support my family and now my grandchildren.”

Of his new career, Mr. Melamid said: “The question is whether I will step over and become real. Whether I will stop being an artist or a conceptualist and become a real healer. That’s what I want to do. I know I’ll never do it, but that’s what I want to do.”


By CHARLES McGRATH