art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

write the history of avant-garde art, and other art historians didn’t understand them
because they had another approach. In this case, a few artists are actually telling the
same story in another part of Europe to their colleagues, artists, and conservative
art historians. So it’s always the same story of discovering or re-discovering the past.
I think the fact that it was artists who opened up the debate is very interesting. The
project functions as a platform from where you can look to the past and the future.
But it is not only an Eastern European project. It’s also a project on the arts, and in
that sense it’s actually directed at the search for quality and discourse in general.
So it starts from this specific geographical point of view, but more generally this
raises questions about context, processes of re-contextualization and conceptual
art practices, including in the United States, Germany, or anywhere else. So it is not
a project merely about Eastern Europe.
PUBLIC (DAN POPESCU): I have two comments on the issue of cultural policy in
Romania, which is a little bit tricky compared to other Eastern European countries. I
happen to know something about it because I own a gallery here. The first problem
in Romania is that the state needs cultural policies. They don’t take into account
the fact that the only way to raise awareness about contemporary artists is to help
private independent endeavors. However, I heard that in Slovenia and also in the
Czech Republic, if I’m not mistaken, this was an issue of national pride: the fact that
the state got involved in helping artists had something to do with building a sort of
national pride or national identity. That’s how I see it, but maybe I’m wrong. Until a
few years ago, all institutions in Romania were state-owned. About four years ago,
the first private venues opened in Romania. So now there is a new fresh institutional
movement that has something to do with the opening of the Museum of Contemporary
Art, the rise of the private sector, and the fact that private galleries are representing
artists abroad.
MARINA SORBELLO: Thank you for these remarks. But maybe we could go back to
the topic of what the position of culture in the current post-socialist countries is.
ZSOLT SOMLÓI: As I said, I am 38 years old, I have lived here for fifteen to sixteen
years and for twenty-two or twenty-three years I lived over there, in a one party system.
At that time, culture was important on two fronts: the first front, the one on which I
agree with Viktor, is that Marxism stated that people must develop themselves. So
if you are a rural worker, your son has to be a white-collar worker and your grandson
has to be an intellectual. It was in this atmosphere that the government put a lot of
money behind culture, with the idea that culture was for everyone. So my grandparents
were normal, ordinary people, and we had opera season tickets. I grew up going to the
opera twice a week. We had front row seats and it cost the equivalent of two Euros.
For five dollars I could buy five books because the government subsidized it. The
other aspect of culture and art at that time was resistance, because art and culture
were very good expressions of discontent with the system. For some people, culture
was a central political issue, and for others, culture was a way of demonstrating
hatred for the communists. Novels, paintings, and music became an expression for
not liking the system. So culture was important at the time. As for now, from what I
see from the media, Brad Pitt’s wife is more important than what is exhibited at the
National Kunsthalle in Hungary. Around 1990, every region had a very competitive
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