art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

of the development of society. The socialist state was very generous in relation to
culture. It was generously subsidizing museums and other cultural institutions.
Usually this is explained in an ideological key, whereby a socialist, totalitarian
state used art as a form of ideological indoctrination of the population, as a form
of propaganda. Which was partially true. But at the same time I also think that
there was a second component, an extremely important component, which has
something to do with the “socialist utopia” that was the basis for Soviet society.
Maybe you remember the very famous pages from Marx’s “German Ideology” where
he describes communism in a very utopian way. Marx writes about people dedicating
a few hours a day to work, and then they have a lot of free time in which they draw,
go to see museums, sing songs, compose music. In other words, they devote their
free time to cultural activity. I think that this idea of the fullness of life, the idea that
the Socialist worker should divide his or her time between work and cultural activity
was very profoundly rooted in Socialist societies. It’s the reason why we had not only
big museums but it is also why the Russian state used to give money to clubs and
other independent activities. There were a lot of institutions where it was considered
a socialist experience to give the population the possibility to express themselves in
cultural forms. This is what totally disappeared in post-Soviet time.
I still remember an enthusiastic pamphlet by liberal writers and journalists from
the early 90s in which they proclaimed that finally cultural activity would become
self-sufficient. To them, culture that was supported by the state was ideology. Real
culture belongs to the people, it is a culture for which the audience wants to pay. If it
doesn’t want to pay, it means that it doesn’t need it. The new liberal democratic order
presumed, logically, that art should be based on commercial income. So that was
the initial impulse. But the problem is, and this is very curious, that what we had as
a result had nothing to do with this neo-liberal idea. Neo-liberal laws in Anglo-Saxon
countries presume that the federal center creates certain conditions which are going
to help culture and cultural production, such as tax incentives. For example, they
make private sponsorship in the cultural field tax-deductable.
There are many ways to lessen the commercial aspects of cultural activity. We can
look at the American system as an example. It can be criticized for many reasons,
but in many ways this model is working. But that’s not what happened in Russia.
There was no attempt to move in that direction. The majority of cultural institutions
still belong to the state. Deregulation and privatization never happened. Or if they
did happen, it was not in order to keep the institutions active, but simply to sell them
as real estate. In fact even the Putin government which is much less neo-liberal now
than it was in the nineties, many cultural and scientific institutions are going to be
sold away. A friend of mine who works at the Center for Nuclear Physics told me: “You
know, Viktor, I came back after the summer holidays, and realized that the building of
our institute has become so beautiful, even the garden around it. It means that we’ll
be sold very soon.” So the neo-liberal idea is essentially to sell cultural institutions as
real estate, not to keep them as cultural assets or as an active cultural resource for
society. At the same time, the state wants to have control over cultural activity. Not
as in Western Europe (in Germany or in France) where the social welfare considers
it its obligation to use social resources and public money to create programs and
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