art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

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edge and this competitive edge was directed against Western Europe. Just a small
example: for a very long time, in Hungary, the biggest political daily had three times
the circulation than the biggest tabloid daily. For comparison, in Germany, the biggest
tabloid circulation is 6 million copies and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has a
circulation of 350,000 copies. In Hungary and the Czech Republic it was absolutely
the reverse. So generations grew up on the notion that culture was important and is
a part of your body and soul. Culture’s importance seems to have gotten lost in the
last fifteen years, and we just follow the western European and American standards
for our way of living and thinking.
ANETA SZYLAK: I wanted to also say something about standards, but I don’t think
this remark is only about Eastern or central Europe. It’s generally about Europe, or
possibly the entire Western artistic system. So I think that the conviction we inherited
from modernity is that we consider the institution as a building, a structure, a budget,
or sometimes a brand name. This is no longer relevant to what is really happening
in art and artistic production. This kind of branding connected with the institution
doesn’t have any kind of creative power anymore. The artistic institution is not a
kind of a box where one puts aesthetic goods son display. For me, an institution is
first of all an intellectual force and it’s always an individual or a team. It is never the
same institution when the team has changed. So what I wanted to say is that what
counts is this strong individualization, a kind of intellectual authorship behind the
institution. At Wyspa, we have a building, but we can also operate without it. What
really counts is the content behind the term “art institution.” We can have the same
intellectual force without a fancy building, and this is why I don’t want it to be fancy.
That is not a message we want to send to the audience. In general, I think this is
the direction in which we could go in terms of a general transformation, not only in
Eastern Europe, but Europe in general.
VIKTOR MISIANO: Well if I have to contribute to the idea of the function of art in
contemporary society, let’s say in Eastern Europe, I would start with the situation
in Russia during the 70s. Back then, when the young Ilya Kabakov was working in
Moscow, the Collective Actions Group was starting to do their performances, and
young Erik Bulatov was doing some of his first work, the moment was so rich with
talent, so dense with critical and metaphysical pathos, that there is no comparison
with what we have nowadays. I simply wanted to say that in every social context
in modern times art has been produced by a very small circle, a circle zone. In my
opinion, art is usually produced in what I call “zones of autonomy” and “zones of
solidarity.” One of the functions of these zones is to establish a platform for a critical
point of view on society. In socialist times, the aim of this criticism was of one kind.
Today, there are a lot of other reasons to have a critical position on society. What
I was trying to defend in my speech today was that the post-communist state is
imposing a very vulgar, neo-liberal concept of culture, culture as entertainment.
As “art-entertainment”–art purely understood as a commercial product meant to
entertain the audience and the possible purchaser. This practically became state
policy, which is dangerous and needs to be criticized. At the same time these “zones
of autonomy” and “zones of solidarity” produce another level of quality for the artistic
product. The necessity to produce and to articulate another understanding instead