This article considers aspects of interaction between artistic traditions and contemporary art in exhibition projects, simulating the situation of “eternal return” to formal principles or iconographic symbols of classical art. Archive of traditional culture, in which contemporary art history has already included the art of modernism, is an endless source of interpretations, allusions, borrowings, and citations in the works of artists of the second half of the 20th century - Bill Viola, Robert Mapplethorpe, Francis Bacon. An analysis of the relevant exhibition projects presented in this article shows the obvious quality of continuity of tradition in contemporary art ·