Final discussion

   -   Ok, welcome to our final discussion. The discussion will last for approximately two hours, we’ll close it around five, maybe just at five. The first half will be devoted to internal discussion on the participants’ problems, the second half will have the questions from the audience, as it seems to me would be nice.
I will not attempt to summarize all the talks, that would be impossible, I would attempt to briefly deliniate some questions and then I will ask a couple of other questions to the panel, anyone is welcome to react or comment on them.
The first panel was called ‘Philosophy in the creation of concepts’ and dealt with traditional philosophy or traditional philosophical vocabulary and how and if that needs to be reinvented today. We had two contributions by Bernard Stiegler and Valery Podoroga, who unfortunately can not be here now. Then we talked of the constitutive role of technology in the construction of subjectivity and emphasized the way that philosophy has always, to some extent, tempted to evacuate or disregard the impact of technology, the hypnema, or the artificial structures, their constituitive role in the construction of subjectivity.
      Valery Podoroga, on the other hand, more emphasized the emptiness, the incapacity of classical philosophy to address problems of contemporary world and he responded to literature as a broader way to express contemporary discontent, contemporary resistances.
      Valery The second panel was called ‘ Universal … contingency’ and dealt with problems of political philosophy and we had contributions by Jean Jack Rancier and Saskia Sassen, whose paper was read, she is not here, and Chantalle Mouffe. And I think all these three papers, in different respects, emphasized the quality of openness, the quality of, perhaps we should not call it ‘undecidableness’.. but, for instance, Saskia Sassen’s idea of the informal politics and Jack Rancier’s idea of incapacity of anyone to intervene, and finally Chantalle Mouffe’s idea of antagonistic society institutions and how that affects the quality of public space which always is a space of contestation, a space of conflict. I think this panel somehow dealt with the possibilities and aspect of non-closure of public space.
      The third panel was on limits of esthetics, with contributions on modern aspects from Boris Kagarlitsky and Mikhail Ryklin. Molly Nesbith’ talk ‘Light in Buffalo’ was on.. well, it’s more difficult to summarize it- as I understood it was about intersections between various moments in recent political history and recent artistry, and it somehow emphasized the capacity of the category of openness and that we should not construct the totalizing history allow for discontinuities, the fractions of history to exert its influence on both theory and artistic practice.
      Boris Kagarlitsky on the other hand, proposed perhaps a kind of grim and somber picture while describing the aspect of systemic closure, the way that intellectuals are always co-opted, recuperated or integrated in the system, and finally proposed with this alternative either return to the state of barbarity or social revolution. .
      Finally, Mikhail Ryklin, who also as other speakers talked about public space and the limits of esthetics, the limits of openness, the limits of freedom and how we should address the fact, in a certain sense, similar to Shantal Muffe’s term - agonistic space.. .
A couple of times the word ‘postEnlightment’ was used, I’ll probably come back to this later. .
There are a lot of topics I would try to offer some kind of thread.
      The first question and this is connected to the Moscow Biennale, of course, the question of art, the capacity of art. It should be the dominant question. .

      And I think there are two ways to describe the contemporary art, and one of them would be emphasizing the systemic closure in the sense that world forms a system, and a system evolves with art and.. pessimistic description… apocalyptic claims for radical social change.
      Another option would be to describe it as a non-synchronisis, spaces of fracture, in the way that art can always insert itself by proposing counter-histories, counter-models, counter-practices in order to be able to exist because reality is not a whole, it is always fraction, it is always open.
These are two options and one cannot decide which one is the correct one, which one is existential, metaphysical, and which is the way you choose to approach the problem. Still.. .
So, I think there is an obvious conflict.. I would like to ask, firstly, do you agree that there is such a conflict and, secondly, what kind of role that would create for art: in what sense would the capacity of art, the feasibity of art as a critical dimension of its social space effected by these two ways of describing of the current situation.. I leave the word to.. Is there anyone here willing to respond?


B. Kagarlitskiy: Well, I actually believe we are now closing this discussion at the most interesting stage, because I believe since we have gotten to talk about contemporary art because we are not talking about Biennale of the arts, of some kind of arts, say, painting, we are talking about modern arts in general and therefore one of the key challenges is to define the boundaries of the artistic and of the non-artistic, which is strictly speaking, I believe in any society at any time the boundaries between these two have never been very definite they were at all times very ambigous and vague. Let me just quote a very simple example, in Jerome K. Jerome book ‘Three men in a boat’ he talks about Victorian China . Jerome K Jerome says that some objects of the 18th century that used to be just everyday items that kids would play with, without fear of breaking, and then they bring it into a museum and this stimulates a different attitude, they become part of classical culture.
So, he says: ‘I have some porcelaine on my cup-board, just sitting there all day long, one has lost its head or hands but maybe in about a hundred years all these household items will be valued as works of art, and in effect it’s true because Victorian china is now valued and exhibited in the museums.
And that’s exactly where the boundaries between artistic and non-artistic - are indeed very mobile, however today we are faced with the fact that these boundaries are not only ambiguous, they are also extremely difficult to define properly, and we have this gigantic great gap which is not clear in terms of its belonging, I mean what is it? is it about design, is it about the artistic practices, is it a work of art? Because the artistic items are commercialised. Another example I could refer to is the advertisement that caught my eye in the Moscow underground, it says: Yandex .. it reads the following: the following authorities and then goes a list of authorities have no information to offer you, ask your questions to Yandex.. And this advertisement on this huge poster you have loads of announcements that you usually see in bureaucratic institutions, for example, ‘no information available’, ‘don’t ask questions here’. And then there is a line going at the bottom of this page saying: ‘Go to Yandex with all your inquiries’. And then they have a lot of photocollages that we were as at artistic exhibitions, so in effect, we can see an advertising poster which is a purely commercial one, it is not artistic in the least, but it however complies with all requirements posed by contemporary art and at the same time we have loads of works of art that effectively have only and solely commercial objectives, so today we need to revise and redefine the boundaries of the artistic, the creative works, of what is esthetics at large, of the esthetic dimensions and the role it plays in our lives, if you will, the saddest thing is that here I need to pause because I don’t have an anwer to this, I can pose this question to you…


S. Mouffe: What I’d like to do is to relate the question of art to what I said yesterday – the question of gegemony. In fact, my reflection yesterday – I didn’t relate to artistic practices, but, of course I have been thinking about that, I don’t like the distinction which is sometimes made between art and critical art or political art because I think that from the point of view of the theory of gegemony every form of artistic practices has got a political dimension. So, you don’t have on one pole political and non-political art. It is either to contribute or reproduce the common sense which is correspondent to dominating gegemony, or put it under question. So, it has got a political dimension, so this is why I will prefer to distinguish between general form of art and what I will call not ‘political’, but ‘critical’ art to indicate that those types of artistic practices are trying to des- articulate the existing gegemony and re-articulate it.
So, the question is if you are commited to artistic practices whose aim is to be critical, then what one should conceive of this?
I think, this is why I was relating yesterday to the question of agonistic public spaces, because I think the anwer is those artistic practices should contribute in many different ways to proliferation of agonistic public spaces, spaces where one can bring forward all things that dominant gegemony is trying to repress, is trying to make invisible.
So, that is why I think it is important to conceive the public space not as a sphere of consensus, but as a sphere of confrontation because today, particularly, in the situation in which we are living with this kind of consensus in the centre that does not allow for any kind of alternative to gegemony, it is very important precisely to disturb this consensus, to create form of de-sensus, to multiply the possibilities for de-sensus. And this is the point I’d like to insist on. This could be done in multiplicity of way. Definitely pluralism with respect to all artistic practices …. politically correct view – what an engaged artist should do. For instance, I think there is sometimes too much infatuation with the sublime and, say, only those practices are subversive and everything that has to do with beautiful is conservative and bourgeoi, I think it’s honk because in fact there is the supersive power of beauty, of course, it is also wrong to imagine that art importrued exclusively with beauty.
But it is important to realize that one can subvert the dominant gegemony by bringing some kind of utopia, bringing new form of identities, beauty, of course, can be in certain circumstances very supersive. So, this is why one really needs to accept the multiplicity of ways in which this disturbing of current gegemony takes place. The last point I want to make and I also indicated it yesterday at the discussion and I also think is very important, is the question that it is not enough to simply have form of artistic practices whose aim is to create des-indentification, by this I refer to making people taking distances with the present order. That is not enough because this process will not, as I was saying yesterday, automatically bring emergence of order, of a more progressive form of identity. I think the process of re-identification is also important to offer new form of identification, so there is a movement, artistic practices, it is really up to individual groups to decide which side they want to emphasize but art, if one is trying to imagine what can be progressive role of the artistic practices in respect to .. how to critically see the existing gegemony.


B. Stiegler: I am not sure that art has a social role because I think it is social par excellence, precisely as a individuation of a singular. It is high extremity of socialization or desire of desire as socialization. Art is essentially from the order of mistery and therefore of mystegogical practice and I think today contemporary art is a very specific examplification of such a mystery. People’s facing art has become very religious sometimes. For example, Philippe Dejan in Le Monde two years ago said the art was the religion of those born after the death of God. Why? Because one must believe in the work of art, for it to present itself as such, and as a work. Art works as art only in so far as you believe in it. And this is what Kant already said. I think the reflexivity of esthetic judgement is the kind of belief. Now, the question of this esthetic judgement is the question of transindividuation, in my own vocabulary, and in fact in the vocabulary of Simondon. It is in the process of psychic and collective individuation. Work of art is the highest possible kind of transindividuation and reflective judgement is not only shared out in this case, but it is constructed, even suggested in diverse artifices such as marketing. But always comes latent, with danger of mystification.
This is a question, it is a possibility often mentioned by those who interpret it as a ‘speculatative rush’ when the reflexivity of reflective judgement becomes like the naghdag. The access of various speculative buble that may burst at any moment and which is intimately directed to other speculative markets and their variations: buildings, for example and so on. Art presupposes practices. That is to say a ministry of care and cure. And all maner of ministers curators have pride to place along with official representatives and their offices in which one must participate, for example, the second Moscow art Biennale then comes to the same problem as does religion when the world of misbelievers and of vulgus composed of just, as Jack Rancier could say, any one at all, and we claim that all thing is just any thing at all, practically nothing, seems to contradict what is less the essence of art that its reason, and in French it is ‘motif’ because in French ‘motif’ and reason is the same. It is the source and origin of emotion which is also of reflective emotion. So, like religion, contemporary art has its superstion followers, its begots, its fanatics, its gnostics and its agnostics. I’m an agnostic, for example. And a good gnostic that is an artist, for me. Good gnostic in art is good.. excuse me.. good art perhaps works through agnosticism.
A work of art works only in so far as we believe in it, in so far as it affects us, it indicates flash of existence, for me, another plane that of existence in so far as we believe in it. Gilles Deleuze called it a ‘plane of consistences’. This plane which is another plane of existence, although it does not proceed from anywhere else than from existence, not from some beyond or behind existence. This plane is projected from immanence and within immanence, in that which forms the ground of the question of reflective judgement which refers back to what can not be reduced or compared to objective determinations, that is to say to the objects to determinate, of cognitive judgements, that do exist. The cognitive is not mysterious, whereas reflective is mystery itself. Reflective judgement is universal by de faute, it’s universality, it is not random in this third critique.. technique precisely because we are speaking of de faute.
It’s universality in its mystery precisely when it imposes itself by making itself present in de faute and that is why work is always idiomatic. Language speaking only as de faute, mystery of de faute precisely. Now, we are living in a time of unloving. The time of liberal economy which is capitalistic and capitalism places desire at the centre of its energy. This economy leads to the ruin of this desire and to the suppression of the filia, what Aristotle called filia – the affect of the democracy, and more generally of this affection, but drive, affection which is not drive that nonethic soul express for one another and for all objects of their world. Love in the West and specifically in Christianity is desire, affect, is constitutive of filia and in this respect is constitutive of individuation. On the psyche plane, as well as on the collective one , the first and prerequisite condition of this individuation is that it must be turned with care in the plural; we are by accesses produced by consistences standing on the other plane. They do not exist- doubtful and improbable. Works of art are such cases of care in the plural.
But they themselves must be cared for and looked after. One must be initiating to these objects which are themselves initiative mysteries. So, I think that is the question.


J. Rancier: I want to tackle the issue from a very different point because I don’t think we are to pose the question in the form what art must be or what art has to do. I think we are always talking about specific practices of displacement. I would just, you know, make a kind of comment on the sentence by Jean Luc Godard, in one of his latest films, which is ‘Our Music’, I think.. So, there is a statement which is a polemical statement… He says: ‘When it comes to Israel, it’s epics. When it comes to Palestina, it’s documentary’. What is meant by this sentence? There are people who are entitled to epics and there are people who are only interested in facts. What concerns Palestina and Palestinians is a matter of fact, a matter of poor people, a matter of victims. Of course, he does not endorse the proposition, he endorses the idea, but he makes this statement. At that moment.. when the film of Godard was released, there was also another film, by a Palestinian film-maker, and the film was about check-points between Gaza.. between Palestina and Israel. The film is about hard and gloomy thing, it is about barriers, check-points and the daily humiliation of people by the Isralian soldiers at check-points. What Suleiman does? With these facts about victims, it is supposed to be a documentary.. he makes a comedy and even introduces a kind of character, a Palestinian young woman who becomes a fighter…
so he puts comedy and he puts fantastics and manga in the situation which is supposed to be a situation where could only be a documentary film, well, I think there was something like that in a Portugese film which takes place in the poor suburbs of Lisboa. The film about those kind of people. And it comes as epic. People are ousted from their houses and they are building new buildings. Kind of epic dimension. From my point of view, is important taking a situation which is supposed to belong to a certain regime of visibility, visibility of facts, visibility of the poor and shifting from that position to another position, affirming kind of right to fiction. This is important because, what I call consensus is, is distribution of position. This is information, this is communication, these are facts. And this is about fiction, imagination and so on. What is important is what art can do.. not only art, those kind of displacement from a situation of visibility, tangebility to another regime.. that is what I mean by dissensus. There are things that are constitutive in such position and you put it in another position.. it’s important now precisely because what is visible in contemporary art is this old paradox: art is specific field, but a specific field in a non-specific practice. One should not be obsessed with: What art has to do specifically as art? No, art is a kind of cross-road where some kind of displacements can be made. This also means, from my point of view, that we should not be obsessed with that: What art should do? Because there is some strategical view of art… as a classical model of critical art, kind of strategical view of art.. If we do something, it must resolve in another thing..
If we adopt this kind of production of things, we are supposed to bring about new energies, new consciousness and we don’t know.. what is important that very often critical art and political art anticipate its effects. What is the core of the esthetic judgement? It is also leaving to spectator to construct his own perception of what is in front of him, or in front of her..


- I would like to rephrase the question a little bit and pose it to Molly Nesbith. Шn your presentation, Molly, you were referring back to the moment of .. by Robert Smithson. I’m addressing you, since you are the only art critic here.. in the late sixties, early seventies there was a tremendous moment of reinvention of concepts and whole mode of spectatorship and all those very important historical shifts. But there was also a moment that changed art critical writing, in the sense that artists started to write in a different way and we had a new generation of critics that would engage with art works in different ways. I wouldn’t say there was a moment of contact with philosophy, but I would say – with social theory or psychoanalisis and semiotics. It was also a kind of very informative moment perceived through somehow intellectually valued art criticism. How do you see art criticism today, in that perspective?


M. Nesbith: There are actually, there is a couple of different ways to relate to this. I am not going to say that art criticism is part of it through the second zone. Because I think it’s important as we started to speak about markets in a general way to break down the idea of market, break down the idea of specific practices and specific conditions of exchange and so on because I think Jack is right, art can do many things and it is not right to try to fix it too much because then it can’t breathe. It can’t breathe through the future, just as it couldn’t breathe in the past. Not breathing, I suppose, is barbarism, isn’t it? But the idea of market, it seems to me that we have tended to trud out, it has to do with mass market of capital in a way in which commodities can be figured for the entire population, according to some laws -the lowest denominator or whatever. Yes, those markets certainly exist, but they’ve been developing, especially lately, in terms of niche markets and broke down to regional markets and straightified to such a degree that mass is.. Actually, I think if one asks economist, are not really viable as a category which has this idea of market.
And.. we had that idea that a work of art is either floating in that forest full of vicious animals mass market, or it’s another option which is somehow strangely conflated to the art market. Or another option is to work for the museum, which has another idea of universality or total function, which is related to the treasure chest, and tends to evacuate the work of art’s historical meaning, which is a part of a trade-off, if it becomes treasure. Now, we are having right now, I think we have museums busy turning themselves into corporations, which are happy, not happy, but they do divest parts of their collections, they do manipulate their collections so as to circulate their exhibitions around the world, they branch, they have much more ambitions, entrepreneural side to them, something they have never had before. In essence, they function as a platform, which is not exempt, in fact, from a market condition. Most works of art that I know, are not trying to enter a world of normal commodity, but they do fool around of different kinds of art markets. The art economy, most people think of a gallery economy, and it is the top end of the gallery economy, a really high-brow luxurious market which is comparable, I suppose, with Chanel, or Luis Vuitton, in which certain works of art, usually paintings and sculpture, but nowdays video gets to play this game to cost, lots of money, really a lot of money, which is well beyond the range of most collectors. There is a group of supercollectors, Saskia called them supercollectors, who have produced another zone for art the market and the art world. It is not the zone that needs criticizm. It needs its own logic and value to keep going and it will find its own place of residence.. I don’t know if it’s possible, maybe Dane has ideas on that, but it’s very different kind of space. I don’t know if it is present so much in Moscow this space, I see it in places like New York or London, places that have very strong stock markets, and very strong antic markets that go on with them, and very strong auction houses. At the same time that that exists, there is some kind of opening up of other types of art markets, of other kinds of investment possibilities that have to do with different kinds of products and activities that can be related to performance activity or object based activities. Those have smaller audiences, different kinds of objects, just diverse kind of output which then involve different kinds of marketing strategies, different kinds of collecting possibilities, maybe this work is suitable for a museum, maybe not, but there is a real.. because of the amount of money available for culture right now, there is an expansion of investment. It seems to me that that is the zone that we all could be very interested in because it, too, doesn’t have exactly a public space yet, but it is more interested in a larger public, not just in a private collector. And it’s anxious to experiment both with museum and gallery models, constellar models, or playground models, or, I don’t know, game models, or rock concert models, but it is not like it, it does not operate with money and it does not take profits, it may not take big profit or it can work non-profit.
But it is a zone, an economic zone that we have to be mindful of, if we speak about markets or growth.
As you look historically at the way which art produced phases of innovations, there are different kinds of group organizations that we talked about, and there is this first phase, the avant-garde, which usually dates from impressionists who put themselves forward as joint stock company initially, and who tended to work with different kinds of innovative practices, trying to modernize reprezentaion and the activity of an artist, and that would meant that at the turn of the century they will be involved with a page of a magazine experiment and cinema experiment as a way of finding new support and new public, and they would also be allied with the building industry, décor and design, they were looking for new renderings, new public and new location for their work to be more integrated in the activity of an everyday life. Those experiments basically came to an end in the West with a crash of 1929 and what you have after that is the situation with a museum of modern art which were beginning to be founded, picked up the energy and picked up painting and sculpture markets, in particular, valuerised them and put them at the centre of the stage, they had not been at the centre of the stage for the previous thirty years. You also have a little art gallery coming forward in kind of saving the day, in terms of producing experimental spaces, and this situation goes on, and pretty much like that through the second World War, through the sixties, until the late sixties and the early seventies when there is another rupture, I can’t exactly explain why there is a rupture in the markets and models of productivity take place, I think it has to do with seduction of TV and news support of film media, of experimental film media and experimental theatre, in particular. Those seemed to be interesting places for artists to work. But going along with that, you have a kind of atrophying of art criticism into this kind of stiff formalist position, at least in the English speaking world. And many artists felt it was important to produce speech and explanation and debate for themselves that could debate and extend and open up the discussion about a work of art, which is why you have this.. you have an art form founded in the late sixties and you have many artists taking up the pen to write criticism at length. That is a relatively new phenomenon in the way which they do it. Many of them were great readers. They don’t read in a professional way, disciplines, they just read. But those artists as they become writers show off their reading and work off with these concepts and produce a different kind of discussion which proved to be very unruly and not really capable of being submitted to the museum catalogue or the museum version of modernistic art history, which is why, I think, it remains so fertile as ground. And to some extent, I am not going to expand on it for long, art criticism has benefited from this opening up, although I would say that art critism per se, as a way of judging and valueing work in relation to producing the news and discoveries, and bringing works of art to the attention of the art world because art criticism is really mostly for the art world, that it has lost its function because the art world did such a good job of discovering and finding and opening the market that it does not need an art critic in the old way. That actually produced a crisis for art criticism that is why maybe we are calling to the phylosophers now, not just to produce legitimation for Biennale, but to give us a new language, or a new seriousness, to find another job for art criticism to do. In essence maybe other kind of art criticism can perform other kinds of functions, culturally, carry other kinds of information, other kinds of political meaning, other kinds of public discussions.. I don’t know, I think that’s a lot to ask from art criticism. But certainly, the problem of art criticism is quite complicated, you know, and with that, I leave you.


- Well, I don’t know if the philosophers are willing to introduce any kind of legitimation. I have a doubt they will.. Does anyone have any comment on that?


B. Kagarlitskiy: In what I’m interested from all of you is why you need to see the market in this reduced way? You know.. as if it’s becoming a sort of a .. devil, you know, against which to rail.. What’s productive about seeing the art market aglow like that? It’s clear that what I’m saying is no news to you.


M. Ryklin: I would like to say a few words, I can add, as far as I know many other philosophers, in principle, none of us stands against the art market per se. The problem is what the philosophy is looking for in the art? If you have a look at a most ancient philosophic text, Socrates’ ‘Ion’ or Plato’s ‘Dialogue’, it is one of the simplest dialogue, introduction to philosophy. Socrates is actually talking to some singer, Ion, and proves to this man, who is one of the best singers of Greece and who gained lots of awards and money, and he is saying to Socrates all the time: ‘You know, I understand Homer better than anybody, I have lots of laurel wreaths and awards, so Socrates structures the dialogue in a way that he proves to Ion that he does not know Homer. And Socrates in that brief dialogue proves that he is ignorant, but very passionate about Homer. And Socrates is not interested that Ion has a lot of awards and he is rich, much more rich than Socrates, that huge crowds of people applaud to him. He is not saying that it’s bad, he says: ‘It’s wonderful that you gained money and so on, the quesition is whether you are familiar with Homer.. Or without in reality knowing him, you praise him in this twist of inspiration..’ You know, quite recently there was an auction where they sold works for more that a half billion US dollars, you could read in the newspapers that it was a world record for selling art, it was said this record was set just couple of weeks ago.. It’s wonderful, but what is the eventfulness of this auction? It’s great that Klimt has been sold for big amounts of money and Vincent Van Gogh also reached these heights, but it all belongs to the past. What is the eventfulness of the contemporary art? In 1980-s I was very close with Moscow conceptual artists, I worked together with them, I wrote about them. It’s a paradigm of Moscow conceptualism, it has become a classical one. Its representatives, like Ilya Kabakov, reside in the US. And in principle, the problem was that they were providing some sort of understanding of situation of that time, the 1970-s and 1980-s, it was a very important paradigm of understanding of the functioning of the Soviet ideology. Kabakov was very bright in it. And I think, irrespective of how the market is functioning, there is no hostility against the market of musefication of art. The philosophers are more interested in other things. Last year I was in Karlsruhe, they were celebrating the 75th anniversary of Jean Baudrillard. He arrived himself. And this question was discussed at large because at one stage, Baudriller who wrote texts which were very influential at the art market, at some point he was invited to the US to legitimise a certain artistic trend. But Baudrillard rejected that offer, even though the financial benefits he could gain were incomparable with what he could earn as a philosopher. He refused that offer because that was not that he was interested in as regards modern art. And if we are reading texts of contemporary art critics we see that mostly these texts are influenced by well-known philosophers, such as Derrida, Fuko, Deleuze, Baudrillard. If we are reading the texts of art critics, we naturally find certain structures, complex mosaics. Some texts are closer to Delez, some are closer to the constructive structures, Derrida and so on. The language of art criticism versus philosophy does not have its own independency. It is some sort of, like, ‘shuttle’ diplomacy between philosophy and art market. It is playing an important role, and nobody is nivelating that, but saying that it is exhaustive and the interest towards eventfulness of art on that basis must be reduced is an exaggeration, of course.


J. Bakstein: I would like to react instantly. I can not agree that the language of art criticism is not autonomous against the language of philosophy. I think that philosopher interpretes the paradigm as regards.. it is like Haidegger commenting Van Gogh and so on and so forth, and Moscow conceptualism was discussed in the same way.. It seems to me that the discussion is sort of nostalgic, it’s coming like from the camp of philosophers who interpret art, who are familiar with the practice, but somehow are located outside that zone, the zone of art as practices, and is the shortage of the Enlightment paradigm which is elitarian. I understand that since I belong to the generation which was born in the Soviet Union and survived through this elite position, it is a bit nosy compared to other positions, but we believe that we managed to survive through this society feeling superior to the average. Barbarity is actually sinonimous to democratization in the area of culture which inevitably arrived after the age of ideological understanding of art and the age when art was part of ideology. This commercialisation is the payment for de-ideologisation which appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Berlin wall and post-Enlightment, post-modern and that great age when my generation was born and brought up. These nostalgic notes exist here. It’s just that forms of detalisation are different, the artistic practices, I understand that very well, and I’m very nostalgic for collective actions which Misha mentioned, but this is a different type of eventfulness of a different age. And now art should reformulate its position and survive, as far as I understand, but the market itself has a totalitarian component, of course, but it also has a democratic dimension which you are not covering somehow due to the Marxist science..size of Kagarlitsky.. it’s a different matter. There is immanently this magic of art, but at the same time there is some sort of eventfulness which is reproducing itself, which did not disapper, and it’s too early to bury the art. Thank you.


B. Kagarlitskiy: Well, since this now concerns me, I will have to answer. Well, about nostalgia and being nostalgic – this is something I really hate. Well, in the first place, in so much as regards the market. Do you think Van Gogh’ works have become better because there was no way to sell them in the past, whereas today they are worth one million dollars? Or even more than that.. I mean the paintings by Van Gogh.. I mean to us fifty thousand or one million dollars is pretty much the same thing because we can’t buy his paintings at this price anyway, but has it become better because it is worth more today? This is actually a matter of values, because I think we are really fed up with it. I mean the market orients the society to believe that Van Gogh has become more valuable just because it can be sold as a commodity. Period. If we talk about museums, it’s pretty much the same thing, a museum only has its meaning and significance as a non-commercial, non-profit space, as soon as it gets commercialised, it looses any significance. A museum conceived as some type of activity that allocates some kind of space outside and beyound the pressures of everyday reality, in the sense that it is a specially preserved space. For instance, if you begin hunting in a specially preserved nature park, it is no longer a specially preserved nature park. The same goes true with regard to museums. As soon as museums get commercialised, they are no longer museums in the proper sense of this word.


Expansion of mass culture.. Well, mass culture is in matter of principle totalitarian and anti-democratic. What about social realism? Well, social realism is a form of mass culture, and by all means is one. And, effectively, we can find trends in American painting analogous to social realism. The same is true of the British painting. Effectively, if you come close to the British museum, Buckingham Palace. If you stand in front of the Buckingham Palace you see this phenomenal stature, the Queen Victoria monument. So, compare this kind of monument to the way the ‘Revolution Square’ underground stations in Moscow, you will see the exactly the same thing – it is about glorifying the relationship between the power and the people. So, I’m talking about the ideologisation, its super-ideological paradigm, the ideologisation is alter ideology, hyper-ideology because ideologisation presupposes that yet there is another paradigm that has no competition with yet some other ideology because ideologies by all means at all times clash. At this point, as soon as we say that ideology is no longer an ideology, it means that competition is simply banned. So, the ideologisation is a mega- , super-ideology which, in fact, has some very positive, concise and clear bearing. This is pretty evident. Period. As to the mass culture.. there is yet another important point to it. It is hyper-elitist. Why? Well, because it presupposes a most passive kind of perception and a very strict division between the recipient, the beneficiary and those who deliver this message to the masses. By those who usually create the messages. It does not presuppose any interaction, any empowerement. And, in effect, it’s quite telling that we do not have the Russian equivalent to the word ‘empowerement’, that is power through participation, through getting involved, it is a process. The fact that we lack this word, this concept in Russian speaks a lot of our history. So, the culture of passive consumption is related to yet one more issue, the issue of power because the culture of Enlightment or the classic culture is inseparable from power because being literate is inseparable from being at power. 01.03 Because in order to understand what is actually taking place, what is going on, you need at least to read a decree, because otherwise, if I am illiterate I can not write a decree, let alone gain a power. So, the power becomes privilege, and a mass culture demolishes, destroys citizenship. Citizens are incompatible with the power, and the power remains in the hands of minority that technically spreads the mass culture and at the same time extends its control over classic culture because they took control of the TV and also control of the Bolshoi Theatre. So, for them mass culture is going to be a product that they deliver elsewhere, to the outer world. And elitist culture that they may have for themselves, whereas for the others it is going to be a mass chewing gum, a chewing gum. And this effect is denying democracy.

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