art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

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art theory. The magazine is published in Russian. He has curated many exhibitions,
among these the “Moscow-Berlin” exhibition in Berlin, and was commissioner for
the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Aneta Szylak, theorist, art critic and
curator, comes from Gdansk in Poland, and is the founder and director of the center
Wyspa, Institute of Art, and vice president of the Wyspa Progress Foundation. The
Wyspa Institute of Art is devoted primarily to art and the exchange and networking
of international exhibitions. She is also the correspondent for many art magazines,
among them “Mare Articum”, “Praesens”, “n.paradoxa”. She recently discovered a
passion for teaching and she currently teaches at the Johannes Gutenberg University
in Mainz, Germany. Last but not least, let me introduce Zsolt Somlói from Budapest.
He is a businessman and art collector. His collection of contemporary art that he
started together with his wife Katalin Spengler counts over three hundred works of
contemporary art, Hungarian and international. You will learn more about it later.
Now each of the guests will have more or less ten minutes to talk about the topics
of their choice. We will start with Viktor Misiano who will probably talk about theory,
the general implications of the changes that occurred in the past fifteen years in
Eastern Europe, and the so-called “post-communist condition”.
VIKTOR MISIANO: Thank you, Marina, very much. First of all for the fact that
you are considering theory as something general and so important that practical
issues should be discussed after the presentation of a general methodology. It’s
something very much related to classical German philosophy, which in our liberal and
pragmatic time is considered to be a thing of the past. In reality, yes, I’m probably
going to give you a very schematic, general overview of a certain situation, but it
will at the same time also be quite concrete. First of all, I’m going to speak about
the Russian situation, and not going about the general Eastern European context.
As I am probably the oldest in this group sitting here on stage, I had a chance to
take part in many discussions over the last fifteen years that were dedicated to the
Eastern European context. The more time passes, the more reasons there are for
considering Eastern European as something unique and as having something in
common. Even if there are a lot of economical, political, cultural, historical reasons
for this. But at the same time, during the last fifteen years, these countries went in
very different directions. Slovenia went in one direction, and the Republic of Serbia
went in the opposite direction. The situation in Russia is very much different from that
in the Czech Republic. And the Czech Republic, like many other Eastern European
countries, is part of the European community, while Russia will never be a part of
that community. So really we accumulated many different experiences in the last
fifteen years. I’d like to speak about the Russian case.
As Marina just told you, I’m the curator and editor of “Moscow Art Magazine”.
The magazine is in Russian, but we also published some English issues recently. So
professionally, as an activist of the cultural scene, I’m very much linked to the cultural
politics in my country. My work is profoundly rooted in the context of the reforms
which were carried out in the country, and which also presumed a certain new model
of activity, a new model of becoming, and a new legitimization in a post-communist
country. Well, as you know, in Soviet times, in Socialist times, this is what all of us
had in common, art and cultural activity were a part of a very homogenous concept