Art must be understood by the people. Art should be understandable to the people or once again about fern flowers - reading hut

1. There is no abstract truth, truth is always concrete

2. Everything in the world has two sides

3. You must be able to take the moment into account and be bold in decisions

4. It’s better to tell the truth unsuccessfully than to keep silent about it if the matter is serious.

5. It is the youth who face the real task of creating a communist society.

6. Every extreme is bad; everything that is good and useful, taken to the extreme, can become and even, beyond a certain limit, necessarily becomes evil and harmful

7. Without revolutionary theory there cannot be revolutionary movement

8. The rich and the crooks are two sides of the same coin.

9. Big words can't be thrown to the wind

10. War is a test of all the economic and organizational forces of every nation

11. In general, anger usually plays the worst role in politics.

12. Universal faith in revolution is already the beginning of revolution

13. The authority of the central institution must be based on moral and mental authority

14. If I know that I know little, I will achieve to know more.

15. Smart is not the one who doesn’t make mistakes. Smart is the one who can easily and quickly correct them

16. Words bind to deeds

17. We must be careful not to cross the line where gossip begins when criticizing shortcomings

18. In a personal sense, the difference between a traitor by weakness and a traitor by intent and calculation is very great; V politically there is no difference

19. It is impossible to live in society and be free from society

20. Ideas become power when they capture the masses.

21. Indifference is the silent support of the one who is strong, the one who dominates

22. Equality under the law is not yet equality in life

23. Despair is characteristic of those who do not understand the causes of evil.

24. Of all the arts, cinema is the most important for us

25. Art belongs to the people. It must have its deepest roots in the very depths of the broad working masses. It must unite the feeling, thought and will of these masses, lift them up. It should awaken the artists in them and develop them

26. Capitalists are ready to sell us a rope with which we will hang them

27. A book is a huge power

28. Any state is oppression. Workers are obliged to fight even against Soviet state- and at the same time cherish it like the apple of your eye

29. People have always been and will always be stupid victims of deception and self-deception in politics until they learn to look for the interests of certain classes behind any moral, religious, political, social phrases, statements, promises

30. No one is guilty if he was born a slave; but a slave who not only shuns the desire for his freedom, but justifies and embellishes his slavery, such a slave is a lackey and boor who evokes a legitimate feeling of indignation, contempt and disgust

31. We must fight religion. This is the ABC of all materialism and, therefore, Marxism. But Marxism is not materialism that stops at the ABC. Marxism goes further. He says: one must be able to fight religion, and for this one must materialistically explain the source of faith and religion among the masses

32. We must systematically undertake to ensure that the work of creating a press that does not amuse or fool the masses is carried out

33. You need to be able to work with the human material that is available. They won't give us other people

34. Don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes, don’t be afraid of repeated, repeated work to correct them - and we will be at the very top

35. Defeat is not as dangerous as the fear of admitting defeat.

36. Ignorance is less distant from the truth than prejudice

37. The deepest source of religious prejudice is poverty and darkness; we must fight this evil

38. Incontinence in sexual life is bourgeois: it is a sign of decay

39. In sexual life, not only what is given by nature is manifested, but also what is introduced by culture

40. Morality serves to human society rise higher

41. I also cannot vouch for the reliability and steadfastness in the struggle of those women whose personal romance is intertwined with politics, and for the men who run after every skirt and allow themselves to be entangled by every young woman. No, no, this doesn't fit with the revolution.

42. A person’s shortcomings are, as it were, a continuation of his advantages. But if advantages continue longer than necessary, are revealed not when necessary, and not where necessary, then they are shortcomings

43. Patriotism is one of the deepest feelings, consolidated by centuries and millennia of isolated fatherlands

44. As long as there is a state, there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state

45. Politics is the most concentrated expression of economics

46. ​​Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the entire country

47. We will work to introduce into the consciousness, into habit, into the everyday life of the masses the rule: “all for one and one for all”, the rule: “each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, to introduce gradually but steadily communist discipline and communist labor

48. Communism is the highest, against capitalist, labor productivity of voluntary, conscious, united workers using advanced technology

49. Communism is the highest stage of development of socialism, when people work out of the consciousness of the need to work for the common benefit

50. The revolution of the proletariat will completely destroy the division of society into classes, and consequently all social and political inequality

51. Political events are always very confusing and complex. They can be compared to a chain. To hold the entire chain, you need to cling to the main link

52. Less political chatter. Less intellectual reasoning. Closer to life

53. Let 90% of the Russian people die, if only 10% survive until the world revolution

54. Revolutions are not made with white gloves.

55. The most dangerous thing in war is to underestimate the enemy and calm down on the fact that we are stronger

56. It’s easy to tell a lie. But sometimes it takes a lot of time to find the truth.

57. Talent is rare. It must be systematically and carefully maintained.

58. Talent should be encouraged

59. You must know how to deal with inventors, even if they are a little capricious.

60. We can't do without romance. An excess of it is better than a lack. We have always sympathized with the revolutionary romantics, even when we disagreed with them

61. Every fairy tale has elements of reality

62. Fantasy is a quality of greatest value

63. You need to learn that without a car, without discipline, you can live in modern society you can’t - you either have to overcome the highest technology, or be crushed

64. An economist must always look forward, towards the progress of technology, otherwise he will immediately find himself lagging behind, because whoever does not want to look forward turns backwards to history

65. Ignorance is not an argument

66. The human mind has discovered many strange things in nature and will discover even more, thereby increasing its power over it

67. Only then will we learn to win when we are not afraid to admit our defeats and shortcomings

68. Honesty in politics is the result of strength, hypocrisy is the result of weakness.

69. Study, study and study!

70. Rise of the General cultural level the masses will create that solid, healthy soil from which powerful, inexhaustible forces will grow for the development of art, science and technology

71. From living contemplation to abstract thinking and from it to practice - this is the dialectical path of knowledge of truth, knowledge of objective reality

72. Without a certain amount of independent work, the truth cannot be found in any serious question, and whoever is afraid of work deprives himself of the opportunity to find the truth

73. We must carefully study the sprouts of the new, pay close attention to them, and help their growth in every possible way

74. Honesty in politics is the result of strength, hypocrisy is the result of weakness

75. Lawyers must be taken with a tight rein and placed in a state of siege, because this intellectual bastard often plays dirty tricks

76. Less is more

77. We rob the loot

78. Broken armies learn well

79. Religion is a kind of spiritual booze

80. The intelligentsia is not the brain of the nation, but shit

81. I love it when people swear, it means they know what they are doing and have a line

82. Throwing ringing phrases is a characteristic of the declassed petty-bourgeois intelligentsia... We must tell the masses the bitter truth simply, clearly, directly

83. We do not need rote learning, but we need to develop and improve the memory of every student with knowledge of basic facts

84. School is outside of life, outside of politics - it’s a lie and hypocrisy

85. First of all, we put forward the broadest public education and upbringing. It creates the soil for culture

86. Working people are drawn to knowledge because they need it for victory

87. You can always make a monstrously big mistake out of a small mistake if you insist on the mistake, if you substantiate it in depth, if you “carry it through to the end”

88. Don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes, don’t be afraid of repeated, repeated work to correct them - and we will be at the very top

89. By analyzing the mistakes of yesterday, we thereby learn to avoid mistakes today and tomorrow

90. Smart is not the one who doesn’t make mistakes. There are no such people and there cannot be. Smart is someone who makes mistakes that are not very significant, and who can correct them easily and quickly.

91. If we are not afraid to speak even the bitter and difficult truth directly, we will learn, we will certainly and unconditionally learn to overcome all and any difficulties

92. One must have the courage to look the unvarnished bitter truth straight in the face.

93. Don’t delude yourself with lies. It is harmful

94. Self-criticism is, of course, necessary for every living and vital party. There is nothing more vulgar than smug optimism

95. Man needs an ideal, but a human one, corresponding to nature, and not a supernatural one

96. Don’t philosophize, don’t put on airs about communism, don’t cover up negligence, idleness, Oblomovism, backwardness with great words

97. Check all your work so that words do not remain words, practical successes of economic construction

98. A person is judged not by what he says or thinks about himself, but by what he does

99. Labor has made of us the force that unites all workers

100. There are such winged words that with amazing accuracy express the essence of quite complex phenomena

101. I don’t know anything better than “Appassionata”, I’m ready to listen to it every day. Amazing, inhuman music. I always think with pride, perhaps naively: these are the miracles people can do!

102. Cooperation between representatives of science and workers - only such cooperation will be able to destroy all the oppression of poverty, disease, and dirt. And it will be done. No dark force can resist the union of representatives of science, the proletariat and technology

103. He who does nothing practical makes no mistakes

In the original, you know who: “Art must be understood by the people...” As you can see, the meaning is completely different. But Marcel's famous "Toilet" became the source of the theory according to which art does not have to be understandable to the demos in the toilet, it must be understandable in a special "artistic space" that turns the toilet into a work of art. At the same time, by demos we again mean not you and me, but certain “elites” endowed with a special artistic taste that turns art into a social marker.
And here's an experiment:
One of the finest violinists of our time, Joshua Bell, played his Stradivarius at the Washington Metro station, which was chosen for its remarkable acoustics.
several works from unworn classics, opening an unexpected impromptu, Bach's Chaconne from score No. 2 D-minor - one of the most beautiful and difficult works of Bach to perform, which actually explains its unwornness.

"...experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

Three minutes later an old man was found who turned his head and listened, after another half a minute a woman, almost without stopping, threw a dollar and only after 6 minutes someone stopped to listen. In total, Joshua Bell played for 45 minutes and during this time 1070 people passed by him, 27 of them threw money at him, usually while running, and only 7 people stopped to listen to him play.

The Washington Post developed a whole theory on this basis, and I will dwell on this theory, which explains not so much the playing on the Stradivarius in the subway, but rather the Washington Post, the loss of Hillary Clinton and the death of David Rockefeller a little later. But in reality it's all about the metro station.

A few days ago, in one of the jazz clubs, I told this story to a wonderful musician who, in a difficult moment of his life, played in the New York subway. It's all about the station, or rather the audience:
The rich public (bourgeois) who go to concerts can perceive art only in a certain context, so it’s not worth playing in subway stations near Carnegie Hall - no one will listen, and they’ll also drag you to the police station. Most of the money is thrown at 42nd Street - a place of dark wonders that I have written about many times. The largest crowd around will be on 34th Street and you can also find work there - a passing bar owner will invite you to play in his bar in the evening. But they will LISTEN only on Broadway-Lafayette - where the ferns usually bloom.

OLGA SLAVNIKOVA

ART DOES NOT BELONG TO THE PEOPLE

Funny notes about sad circumstances

What needs to be done so that the residents of Yekaterinburg begin to jump en masse from the Tsarsky Bridge into the Iset River? It is necessary, as in the famous joke, to place a sign on the railing: “Jumping into the water is strictly prohibited.” Since the Ural mountaineers really don’t like anyone forbidding them from doing anything, a line of swimmers with ice cream will line up at the sign, and the old, oven-like arches of the Tsar’s Bridge will be echoed by the hoots and splashes of metallized Iset water. As for the sign itself, they will definitely write and draw something on it. The withered ones will be tied to her air balloons, someone will hang it and forget the trampled socks on it, they will put soapy bottles of fresh beer under it. Then it will be stolen - if the efficient Museum of Youth does not get ahead of it - by some private collector. This tablet with everything that is attached to it will be a work of modern folk art.

It's funny that in the days of "Forbidden" signs, art - with the exception of particularly "ghostly" cases - belonged to the people. Because people stole these signs! The misappropriation of “The Gulag Archipelago” in the fourth earthy typewritten copy or Nabokov’s “Other Shores” in the form of a box of glued photographs felt psychologically like theft. Accordingly, money did not seem to be involved in the process. That is, in reality, they quietly flowed somewhere deep below: I, for example, knew two young people who were for some reason very similar to each other - graceful, about seven-eighths of life-size, deftly packed in bright blue jeans - whose business on similar copies and on brochures of the Institute of Philosophy with the stamp “DSP” it was fantastically cost-effective. However, the transfer of money to them was perceived not as payment to sellers for such and such a product, but as assistance to accomplices, voluntary contribution to the alternative party fund. Complicity in a national crime (although they had not been imprisoned for this for a long time) had the same resonance with the communist party as the simple-minded blue of the Taiwanese “Wranglers” - with the red color of naive, like things from “Children’s World”, units of visual propaganda. This simple street “la-la” served, however, as the background of some spiritual work. If a thing has been appropriated, if it is yours, then everything that is present in it is yours. And people who just wanted a desecrated sign with a ban (in order to further desecrate it by the fact of their sole possession), read what they received as a load. And watched movies! And we went to exhibitions! There were, however, some funny things. For a very long time, a certain man suspected me, then a first-year student at the Faculty of Journalism, that I myself had “made” on my portable, lame “Moscow” not just anything, but “Ugly Swans” (“This vulgar chatter!”) and attributed the authorship to the brothers Strugatsky, in order to confuse his regular intellect with unhealthy images and alien authority. On this issue, relationships were sorted out all winter in cramped, bathhouse-like discussion kitchens and at deadly tram stops, burned to white ashes and coals (for some reason, the winters during my student years were huge, like ashes, forty degrees, like vodka, now no - isn’t it because the spiritual climate has become demi-seasonal?). Now this former comrade, and now a gentleman (more at ease than many who replaced what Victor Pelevin wittily called “social articles”) does not read books in principle; who in reality was the author of the contents of that dirty journalism department daddy (with the hypocritical and foppish inscription “To the room”), he doesn’t care. At least Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. His son, who looks very much like his dad and for some reason a little like Brezhnev, is honestly sure that the book “Ugly Swans” was written by Paul Anderson.

When precious tablets began to rapidly disappear from our lives, the first person in Yekaterinburg to feel the movement of the elements was the critic Slava Kuritsyn. He announced a great initiative: to gather all the people, until it's not too late, photographs and descriptions of monuments to Lenin Vladimir Ilyich. Appearing at the editorial office of the Ural magazine, Slava presented those who wished with fresh additions to his folk collection. There was, I remember, a lyrical photograph where a plaster bust of Lenin, like a white cat, sat on the window sill, about the eighth floor, and looked at the grayish urban landscape, in reality as unchanged as in the image - in turn, due to the dirty glass, very similar to the photograph. Another photo shows almost the same bust, but narrower standing on the floor, was for some reason scary, like Professor Dowell’s head with a tie. These indoor specimens were very different from the outdoor specimens, or rather, from the square ones. The first were white, the second were invariably dark, against the backdrop of cigarette clouds. From below, in scope, the energetic step of the leader from the steep pedestal was perceived as an attempt at suicide, which was dramatically emphasized by the darkness of madness hidden in the clouds and the flocks of birds forming celestial funnels. There were, it seems, also park options, against the backdrop of plump lilacs. The most impressive effect of the collection was some kind of deep similarity between the samples, not explained by a reference to a common historical original, that is, to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself: it is obvious that the basis of the circulation was not a real, but a mental prototype - the idea of ​​a thing that can be do from one or another material. By the way, the collection, as far as I know, did not include the main Lenin of the city of Sverdlovsk - the monument on the square named after. 1905, wearing a coat. Perhaps it was so obvious and achievable that the collectors left it for later; it is also possible that the hierarchy Lenin monuments, which largely coincides with the bureaucratic hierarchy (which is associated with responsibility for certain institutions and territories), required starting work from the bottom - with the gypsum directors of NGOs and research institutes - so the collectors did not have time to get to the director of the central Sverdlovsk vegetable garden, they were exhausted. Maybe it’s the lazy Kuritsyn’s fault that the mentioned general director continues to live in an area of ​​active political and literary life. Now his auxiliary tribune farm is used almost daily for a communist rally, consisting of a couple of Cossacks with wagging sabers, sad, compared to what it was, red banners (some of them are orange for some reason), a sparse group of sympathetic onlookers and one megaphone. Poems are often shouted through this megaphone - absolutely monstrous, with rhymes like dentures, with words starting with “it”; I heard myself how the speaker called the author of these texts (his last name, fortunately, was drowned out by the ringing of the red tram stuck in the crowd and in the eardrums) as “the people’s poet.” Even at rallies, sometimes such a special box looms - obviously for money, but very similar to a ballot box. You can expect that part of the donations will go towards publishing poetry.

Today money is involved in the literary process clearly and unequivocally. The production of carrier plates has been discontinued; everything that remained from the previous regime was used for the second and third time by Sotsart. Accordingly, theft of art is out of the question. Romance was replaced by such a mundane thing as a legal transaction: pay for the book and take it. And do whatever you want with her. You can read, you can put a frying pan with fried potatoes on it. Paper is still a carrier of super-rational meanings - but not the kind in a book binding, but the kind in a bank package. A very good, funny novel has already been written about the mystical role of banknotes, which have recently learned to transform from a harmless everyday quantity into a dangerous quality - “Money Day” by Alexei Slapovsky. There, three friends, having discovered a package with large rubles and dollars behind a box on the store porch, strive to correctly “read” the book of destinies, theirs and others’, that has fallen into their hands. As a result, they read voraciously - that is, simply put, they drink away. For Slapovsky, drinking with all the soulfulness that accompanies it is a soft form of rock, leaving everything and everyone more or less in their place: in this capacity, it neutralizes the fatal potential of a find that threatened to take friends either to the ends of the world - to Vladivostok, or to some nameless , a stop station full of bandits, then simply kill him according to everyday life. However, money has a different nature of conflict with literature, which is even expressed in the conflict of material carriers. Let me give you an example from life. One intelligent lady, who was always planning to re-read Makanin in her spare time, kept two hundred dollars of savings in a collection of his stories “Long is Our Path,” published by the Vagrius publishing house. The thick, richly gilded volume as the keeper of two hundred pieces of paper was chosen, I believe, out of respect for the writer, for vague considerations of the longevity of his art - which cannot be said about any of the operating Russian banks. One day, wanting to check the money and making sure that it was in good order, the lady (being alone in the apartment) suddenly got carried away, sat down on the sofa, put a plush pillow under her back and delved into reading. At first, one of the centenary notes served as a bookmark for her: when the reader went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, the green edge of the dollar bill was clearly poking out from the white edge of Makanin’s pages. However, having returned and grabbed the book, the woman did not find the place where she had been reading; the money disappeared too. The short-haired, flowery sofa was not only examined, but also ransacked; from under it, like brownies, light clods of dust were driven out with a broom; the pillow, being torn open, dumped out an ugly pile of old foam rubber, similar to millet porridge. Everything turned out to be in vain: the dollars seemed to drown in the thickness of Makanin’s prose. Apparently, if the lady had not read what was in this moment not quite a book, she would have avoided mysterious losses.

Nevertheless, in the struggle between money and literature, money almost always wins. Art belongs to the people insofar as the people buy it. Or he doesn't buy it. According to many, the second is more correct. At a press conference in connection with the announcement of the latest Booker “short list,” one well-known critic (typically, a representative of the Kommersant newspaper) asked the question: how is it that the Booker jury chooses completely different texts from those chosen by the reader? That is, why are the finalists of the Russian Booker always commercial failures, while the finalists of the British Booker sell almost a hundred thousand copies? In the subtext of the question, it seemed to me, there was a suspicion: is there a hidden intention here, a semi-conscious conspiracy of the poor and bad students of fading literature against the real leaders of Russian literature? I, as a member of the jury, answered this question and later recognized my words in Kommersant as if filtered through a rag. The liquid that merged into the newspaper text is about nothing, so it makes sense to return to the problem in a calm atmosphere.

The behavior of a writer - deprived of support from censorship and wanting, for example, to simply express his feeling of life in an adequate artistic form - is the behavior of just one of the participants in the book market. There are other characters too. Their behavior must also be taken into account and understood (while keeping in mind that the Russian market differs from the capital market, and the border between these territories is as physically real as the border between sovereign states). It's no secret that no matter how good things are with quality British writers, their circulation still cannot be compared with the circulation of the same romance novels. This is a general cultural situation, a mandatory model for both Russia and the West. But our peculiarity is that the difference between the circulation of commercial and non-commercial literature (at least by an order of magnitude) turns out to be fatal. The fact is that books of poetry and non-entertaining prose pass very poorly through the capillaries of small wholesale and retail trade. Everyone understands that space on a book counter costs a dealer money (rent, employee salaries, taxes - plus, for example, interesting things like bringing the porch and signs into line with the aesthetic requests of a city official). Let’s say the merchant has another Marked One on his right, and something elite from “Vagrius” on his left. On the right, half a stack of books is consumed per day, on the left - one copy. It is clear that the right seat works better than the left. And the merchant removes the elegant Vagrius volume to place another Frostbitten next to the Marked One. And not because he is stupid or has bad feelings towards serious literature. The taxes are simply such that he cannot survive otherwise. In general, after the crisis, everyone’s room for maneuver has narrowed: many are literally living in the cracks. At the same time, the best readers I know are precisely small book dealers: from the old, still Soviet bookstores, who once were on duty near second-hand bookstores, hanging out in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Park and on the Sverdlovsk Yama (it was, as far as I remember, a deep a ditch between two dirty outlying roads with troughs of slush - a crazy picnic on the side of the road, an open-air basement where books lay clean, like sugar or bread). These readers treated the article, which always hung above them, in much the same way as people treat gastritis; the libraries they collected and housed in their small spaces amazed the imagination with their visual power alone, just as a philharmonic organ amazes the imagination. Now it is not they, but other people who think not in texts, but in reported volumes of supplies, trade credits, wholesale discounts and warehouse space, as they say, have risen; but the aged scribes, this special human tribe, raised children like themselves and kept them with them. Having remained “bag men”, these family cooperatives carry books from the capitals from “Ivan Limbach”, from “Ad marginem”, from “Symposium”, from “UFO-Solo”, even from a small publishing house that is not particularly concerned with marketing "Grant". They also make money mainly from books.

Of course, market weather does not make exceptions to the rules. And the weather today is such that it is impossible to sell a manuscript that does not have the goal of entertaining the reader and even simply does not fit into any of the promoted publishing series. In the Yekaterinburg newspaper “Book Club,” which I head and which I try to conduct as a symbiosis of reviews of the book market and the local “Literaturka,” there was a discussion for several months about the economic aspects of the relationship between the writer and society. During the discussion, the famous critic, former editor-in-chief of the Ural magazine Valentin Lukyanin symptomatically defined the writer’s work as “socially useful.” Symptomatic - because this definition unintentionally sounded like a communist subbotnik. When I come to the same Vagrius with a manuscript, I cannot say: “Buy this from me, because it is profitable for you.” I'm basically saying, “I've done a lot of economically absurd work, now it's your turn to publish it and lose money on it.” And “Vagrius” publishes the book, directing real funds into pseudo-turnover and not receiving a profit margin.

I hold it in my hands own novel, taken from a book counter (this is not at all like taking it from a stack of author’s copies: it resembles an unexpected street meeting with one’s own past, for example, with a classmate - what has he become in the years before we saw each other?). This book seems to be mine! - is actually a very strange object. It's for sale. The product in it is the paper, the cover, and what the printing house did with both. But - not the content, not the text that depicted on the pages, but at times it seems to have crumbled somewhere. The result was a pie without filling, a material form, the self-sufficiency of which is ingeniously conveyed in Yuri Polyakov’s novel “Little Goat in Milk.” There, a certain writer, on a dare, with the help, as we would say now, of PR technologies, turned a semi-literate hard worker into a worldwide famous writer. At the same time, the “genius” Viktor Akashin did not write a single line; his “masterpiece” was a couple of folders of blank paper. Subsequently, the “masterpiece” was published: an expensive cover, with a solid block of absolutely blank pages. And they bought this. They bought well. Was there a word?

In general, attempts have been made to turn serious literature into a commodity - and among them there have been absolutely remarkable cases. Critic Evgeny Kharitonov told how at the dawn of the book market, when Boris Vallejo was in great fashion among publishers, he came across a unique artifact at a fair in the Olimpiysky. The cover of the book depicted two “Valjekhovsky” women flying on a dragon, and only when the critic took a closer look did he read: “Fyodor Dostoevsky. Idiot". Now he regrets not buying it. I, in turn, missed the opportunity to get a beautifully published collection of one Perm poetess, equipped with a guide: such and such a poem, due to the extrasensory perception inherent in the combination of words, helps with pressure, such and such (as far as I remember) is a plot against the evil eye, such -increases mental abilities... Being missed, such monsters and centaurs dive into oblivion. It’s a pity: in one decade of its existence, the Russian book market has created such a thing that it is possible to organize a Book Kunstkamera - much larger than any wholesale book warehouse.

The writer, therefore, is objectively an economic pest. Since there is no real effective demand for his product in the current economic conditions, his efforts should be paid not by those who read literature, but by those who believe that literature should be read. Publisher, sponsor, government official, some kind of foundation, rally donation box. It is logical to assume that the art belongs to the sponsor. However, very often the money giver’s concept of literature is as general as the concept of the people: contact with specific text For him, life is as unproductive as talking with individual passers-by about the problems of power and the electorate. As a rule, in his view, total “writers” address total “readers.” There are fewer of the former than the latter, but each person from the first group mathematically corresponds to many persons from the second. The higher (precisely in quantitative terms) the valence of a writer, the more popular he is, that is, people need it more. There is a contradiction here: books with a circulation of 500 copies are very often published with sponsors’ money. Apparently, everything depends on the author’s ability to instill in the sponsor a good thought about the highest valence of each copy. According to my observations, this works best when the text presented for publication speaks the most everyday language. In this case, something particularly convincing for the sponsor arises between the author and the text. portrait similarity: if each of the five hundred books received at the output is also Sobakevich, it means that the multiplication process, from the point of view of the sponsor, went well. I also noticed that very willingly - apparently out of some subconscious quantitative aspirations - those people who in the foreseeable future hope to win some elections (but not during the election campaign!) allocate money for the publication of books. All these are subtleties of the process that you need to know. As a result, it is not the one who writes better who gets the money for his publication, but the one who knocks out the best money. Personally, I know of specialists who publish three or four titles of their poetry a year: stacks of books are stacked like a stove in the far corner of the family home.

It may be objected to: the conditions of the crisis, to which we scoundrels are already beginning to get used, are not the normal conditions of human life and literature, from which correct generalizations could be made. Okay: let’s say we have finally come out of the crisis. The majority of the country's population is middle class; each member of the middle class has a house, two cars and three jobs. What is a writer in this context? The writer stands across the highway economic development. By procreating the reader, he infects society with a dangerous caveat. Because a real reader would not look for a fourth job just to purchase the latest brand of computerized refrigerator. He will most likely spit on both the third and the second, so that when he comes home and without turning it on old bulging TV, collapse with a book on a comfortably sagging sofa. As a result, goods are not sold, money turnover slows down, and new jobs are not created for those who would still like to: a) produce a refrigerator, b) purchase it. Thus, the writer’s work again turns out to be not socially useful, but socially harmful. Writers are the darkness of the economy, the enemies of the people.

Today, a writer, feeling out of place in the landscape, often looks like a man returning from a masquerade and not catching a taxi. This is how he disguises himself. “A Russian writer is walking down the street, he has a trained mouse on a leash, a set of ostrich feathers in his bosom...” wrote the already mentioned Slava Kuritsyn, probably referring to his Ekaterinburg friends (I even wonder if these are the same feathers that were plucked from my ancestral fan into one particularly dead-end New Year's Eve, - in this sense the word “set” is very suspicious). However, no matter how the writer dresses up, no matter how he tramples and devours what other writers created before him, he still, throughout the entire human history remains essentially unchanged. The writer is the dark constant of all social formations: there is no escaping him. And since literature, like all art, exists separately and develops according to its own laws, in an autonomous mode, it does not know whether it is useful or harmful. Pursuing internal goals and striving solely for the maximum realization of its potential, literature brings all the harm it can to society. And economic, and everyone else. Sergei Yursky, in an interview with the Book Club, defined the activities of a number of advanced writers as follows: “They not only reflect destruction as an external process - they create it themselves.” Since, as Kuritsyn put it, “the author sticks together work of art with the work itself, combining the time of life with the time of creativity” - that is, in current artistic practices, be it the creation of texts or something else, there is a return of the ideal to the maternal real environment - something can be expressed only by actually “creating it” . Today Dostoevsky would have to kill the old woman himself, without shifting the matter to the hero. I remember a brilliant caricature: a boat in the middle of a conventional river, from the boat a bearded man throws a splayed little dog into the water, on the shore there is a pyramid of cages with the same unfortunate court terriers. Signature: “└Mumu”, take seventeen.” Well, apparently, this is the stage. One can only hope that he is not an era.

We will not find out whether art belongs to the people if we do not understand who the reader is. This is actually the most difficult thing. If the writer, be he Ivanov, Petrov, Sorokin, is always a specific person and a specific name, then the reader is the Great Anonymous. The best reader is always silent. Its very existence can be judged only indirectly: by mysterious disappearance circulation. Sometimes I find myself thinking that when people I don't know buy my book, I really don't know what they do with it.

It seems to me that in terms of the “writer-reader” relationship, non-commercial literature is fundamentally different from commercial literature. In the first case, the author addresses not the readers, no matter how many there are, but the reader. Each time - to one. Communication with good prose, and especially with poetry, is an intimate process. It destroys that reader’s integrity, without which the sponsor (may the hand of the giver not become scarce!) does not see the book as having a serious address (by the way: isn’t the idea of ​​the teaching mission of literature connected with a purely visual idea of ​​an organized audience sitting in a classroom?). Commercial literature, on the contrary, strengthens this integrity. Savely Besheny, like Conan the Barbarian, like super-combat swimmer Kirill Mazur, is one for all. Commercial text consists of blocks, for which each reader’s head already has a standard assembly diagram. A side effect can be, for example, this: when I remember the plot of an action movie, I often cannot say whether I read it in a book or saw it in a movie.

Accordingly, a commercial and a non-commercial writer inhabit completely different physical continuums. The latter, being in normal human dimension, does not feel anything special and - even if he were a living classic like Makanin or Bitov - can remain private an individual. The first inevitably feels the attraction of a smaller mass to a much larger one: the total body of his audience is invisibly present in the literary subspace and pulls, sucks the writer, changes his idea of ​​up and down and, in the extreme, can cause a complete eclipse of the writer. Moreover: in this body there are unsafe processes induced by the writer himself. Readers, realizing that they are the audience of the same popular author, first begin to look for each other in parties, on the Internet, and then they begin to look for each other physically in order to realize that they are already a collective. And when this finally happens, the reader’s subspace body noisily comes out into real space. And he also demands a writer, physically and alive. So, last summer, as part of the “Unofficial Moscow” festival, a rally of Victor Pelevin’s fans took place. Pelevin himself did not come out to the people.

Here we should remember the representative of the Kommersant newspaper and return to his question and its implications. It is clear that by commercially successful literary leaders who, out of secret envy, are never given a proper Booker move, the critic meant Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Pelevin. Today Pelevin and Sorokin are like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their success seems to refute everything that was said above in these notes. The circulation of Pelevin's novels, according to information from Vagrius, is already approaching the circulation of the most popular action films. Critics say that Pelevin works at the intersection of commercial and “real” literature. It is very difficult to imagine what kind of junction this is: in my opinion, several national European literatures can fit into the gap between the branches of Russian literature. It seems to me that the Pelevin phenomenon can only be understood if we understand the phenomenon of his audience. In a unique Russian situation, when reading books is still perceived from old memory with positive sign, and life no longer leaves time for full contact with literature, we have developed special type non-reading reader. This is an approximately thirty-year-old individual with higher education, with a real or latent desire to make money, with good ambitions and brains - but literature is not among his immediate priorities. Nevertheless, he would like - for various reasons - to be involved in its most advanced examples. Such a reader needs only one, but the Most Important writer. Necessary and sufficient in order to judge the literary process and quote someone appropriately. In fact, he requires a human digest. You need to soberly understand that Generally Recognized Genius is a niche in the book market. It is fundamentally single-seater. This niche could probably be filled by one of the other talented science fiction writers: for example, Sergei Lukyanenko or Andrei Stolyarov. From science fiction - because a non-reading reader needs a gaming literary form: on the one hand, it creates for him a flattering illusion of the work of his mind, on the other hand, it is dimensionless enough so that within it one can freely operate with quotes from his own everyday context. The non-reading reader wanted Pelevin - he got Pelevin. At the same time, few people notice that Pelevin the writer is actually greater than the expectations of the masses directed at him. He seems to accept the terms of the game - but smuggles it into Right well-made bestseller, a lot of good literature. Pelevin's reader consumes - Pelevin “does” the reader in the dark. His last thing, already notorious“Generation ‘P’” is a very angry novel. It is indeed made up of standard components and uses techniques already used by Pelevin: a trademark familiar to the consumer is clearly emblazoned on it. However, the reader cannot help but notice that the story of the creator Tatarsky, who is looking for the wall on which the wall is painted, cruelly tears open the cultural situation that holds the popularity of Viktor Pelevin in the balance. In “Generation 'P'” there are absolutely brilliant statements, for example: “Right in front of his face on the wall there was a poster with the inscription └The path to yourself” and a yellow arrow calling around the corner. Tatarsky’s soul was dumbfounded for a second, and then it was filled with a gloomy guess that “The Path to Yourself” is a store.”

As for Vladimir Sorokin, on the one hand, he is an alternative to Pelevin, on the other, he happily complements him. Sorokin seems to be more elitist, more, as critics define him, “uncompromising.” The audience for Pelevin and Sorokin is apparently different, and it may very well be that these two groups of readers, like cards in house of cards, coincide only at the top edges: where the critics and Slavists are. (It may very well be that thanks to such a coincidence the structure is standing.) For those who have never read Sorokin, must want to read it. The situation is reminiscent of a joke: a somewhat drunk man walks past a pole, sees a sign nailed high on it, but cannot make out what is written on it. Curiosity and courage make a person climb the pole. His movements are incorrect, he breaks down several times, slides his belly down the pole, but continues to try. Finally he reaches his goal and reads the sign: “Caution: Painted.” This is approximately the signature Sorokin effect: when we understand what it is, we have already read it. However, his last novel, “Blue Lard,” for some reason gleams with Pelevin’s effects. That is, it is structured completely differently than Pelevin’s bestsellers. According to the artistic construction, “Blue Lard” is an imperial hierarchy, the despotism of episode over episode, meaning over meaning: perhaps that is why the novel, no matter how much it is rejected, creates a feeling of brute muscular power. And at the same time, it is equipped with quite wearable baubles, like the Chinese babble that you now hear in any humanitarian student smoking room. It will be interesting if Pelevin’s next novel turns out to be “colored” by Sorokin!

To sum up, we can say with confidence: art does not belong to the people, because the people do not buy it - or because they do, and this is also fraught in its own way. Having worked for money and shelled out this money for a book, the reader believes that his work is finished: he is not ready to admit that something more is really required of him. Serious literature is increasingly pupating: young poets are already content with simply giving each other their small-circulation books. As for literature on the Internet, as far as I can tell, it is mostly unprofessional: no one there really strives to ensure that the weight of a line is equal to the weight of one’s own body. Writing as a full-fledged profession is apparently becoming a thing of the past. But now, having said all these platitudes, I will refute myself - because there are exceptions that completely cancel the rules. In one of the areas of the orphaned Sverdlovsk outback there lives a legendary book-seller grandmother. Grandma's only means of transport is a wobbly bag on wheels. With her, the improbable old woman goes around the surrounding villages on foot, carrying dilapidated books from the district library “to order.” It seems like they pay her something at the library, or maybe they don’t. The woman's whiney singing of this cart, hobbling with toy wheels along the ruts of trucks broken like trenches, is the sound that I would like to physically hear when my head is not going well.

Ekaterinburg.

Slavnikova Olga Aleksandrovna - prose writer, critic, essayist. Born in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg); Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Ural State University. Chief Editor Yekaterinburg newspaper “Book Club”. Published in the magazines “Ural”, “Znamya”; in “New World” he appears as a prose writer (the novel “Alone in the Mirror”, 1999, No. 12) and the author of literary critical articles about A. Bitov, V. Rasputin, V. Belov, Yu. Maletsky, the “late” S. Zalygin and others.

According to VTsIOM, every fifth Russian has never been to the theater, every second has been there “once,” but almost never visits the theater. Half of Russian citizens do not go to the cinema, and 13 percent of respondents have never been to a cinema at all. More than 40 percent of Russians have not heard anything about “Night at the Museum”, a third have heard but do not intend to visit, 27 percent of respondents admitted that they have never been to the museum.

Doesn't art belong to the people?

Let's discuss the topic with the dean of the Faculty of Art History of the European University in St. Petersburg, candidate of art history Ilya Doronchenkov.

The world has been experiencing a museum boom for many years now.

This year the head of Kuban Cossack choir Viktor Zakharchenko was awarded a state prize. Is the Kuban Cossack Choir exactly that art that, without any exaggeration, belongs to the people?

I think Kuban song folklore finds an unconditional response in the hearts of a huge number of people, because it meets their expectations. There is a request for something heartfelt, daring, folk, indigenous. The folklore that sounds on stage today is, of course, highly adapted to the modern listener and is only based on folk songs. These guys from the Kuban Cossack Choir, apparently, are excellent professionals who musically embody and visualize one of the images of the Russian people. How this image is constructed is another question.

What caused the awakened mass craving for fine art? Incredible excitement around Serov's exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, long lines for paintings and graphics by Frida Kahlo in the St. Petersburg Faberge Museum...

It seems to me that it is too early to talk about any trend. A renewed surge of interest in some artists is needed in order to draw certain conclusions. Aivazovsky will be at the Tretyakov Gallery in the fall, let's see if he will gather as many people as Serov did. In general, the world has been experiencing a museum boom for many years. The wealthy middle class has been brought up to understand that visiting museums is necessary.

It was not only the middle class who stood in line “to see Serov”; as secular reporters write, “students, pensioners, and generally a very motley crowd” were “seen” there.

This museum boom, in particular, gave rise to the phenomenon of the blockbuster exhibition. We will show you the gardens of Claude Monet! Can you imagine what lines there would be in the United States to see Claude Monet's gardens? I once drove through different museums America, where Monet is exhibited, I saw five humpbacked bridges almost identical, and then I hated them. But Monet is the ideal artist for an exhibition destined for mass success. Or here's a great example - an exhibition of Italian Renaissance portraits in Berlin a few years ago. People came there from all over Europe. And it wasn't just the middle class. These were students and representatives of various social strata. A huge number of people stood in these queues. There are many such exhibitions. And Europeans migrate along them. Now there is a Bosch exhibition in the Prado Museum and another Bosch exhibition in 's-Hertogenbosch in Holland... Such exhibitions are very well intellectually supported: they are made by highly qualified specialists, catalogs are published, which become a scientific event. And of course this is also a commercial enterprise. It is expensive. This requires modern conceptual thinking from curators. This requires preparation on the part of the audience.

Perhaps our audience’s preparedness for the meeting with Serov played its noble role? Did people who knew “The Girl with Peaches” from school rush to the Tretyakov Gallery for new impressions?

It seems to me that the excitement in the last days of the Serov exhibition was partly situational. Good advertising, cold winter in Moscow... If we talk about the content of the exhibition... I think Serov, who was presented at the Tretyakov Gallery, gives the Russian people what they really lack now. He gives him a picture of Russia, which we have lost and which it is pleasant to be proud of. This Russia is very impressive. It's full of portraits of handsome Romanovs and they don't ask why Serov ended his relationship with the Romanov family. For the artistic community, Serov was a stoically moral person, and if he made a certain decision dictated to him by his morality, then he did not deviate from this decision. Few viewers are able to appreciate the unique and, it seems, no one else except Serov has the ability to show the impressive image of the customer and at the same time saturate this image with such irony that it will destroy the surface effect. Look at the portrait of Felix Yusupov with a bulldog. Whose portrait is this? Is this a portrait of Dorian Gray, the young hotshot who will later kill Rasputin? Or that psychological picture a pug that looks like Winston Churchill? Few people can do this. At that exhibition, Serov has a bit of the Russian people and Russian nature, there is a dynamic merchant class, there is a cheerful intelligentsia - look at Ermolova, at Gorky...

This is the Russia that left and which, under Serov’s brush, appears as a very impressive country, which, of course, it was. But the exhibition alone does not answer the question: what happened to Russia? Meanwhile, Serov’s work gave such an answer. There are no items related to 1905 in the exhibition. There is no gouache “Soldiers, brave boys...”, written based on personal impressions of the dispersal of the demonstration on January 9, which he observed from the windows of the Academy of Arts, after which he broke relations with both the academy and its president, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, who had directly related to Bloody Sunday. The curators of the exhibition removed something fundamentally important from Serov. But the exhibition provided a general image of Russia that evokes nostalgia. The most important thing is that we saw magnificent painting. In this sense, success is deserved. But will it be repeated? If it happens again, it will mean that our society really misses the strong artistic impressions, and coming not only from contemporary art.

Russian people are still programmed by the 19th century

What about the Frida Kahlo exhibition, which survived a three-month siege? Is this a phenomenon of the same nature as the Serov exhibition?

Frida Kahlo is a little different. If Serov is a painter from God, then Frida Kahlo is not a painter. For her, brushes and paints are a way of self-projection, of presenting her states, complexes, and suffering. Since she is in the context of surrealism and primitivism, she may not be able to write and still be a very effective artist. But here, it seems to me, a big role was played by the fact that thanks to Hollywood cinema she is already a pop star. And the contingent at her exhibition was different. In addition to St. Petersburg pensioners who go to all important exhibitions, there were a large number of people representing the so-called creative class. People who are well-packed, wealthy, who can come from Moscow to look at this small exhibition by paying 500 rubles for entry, and who themselves understand how an image is made. Display of this exhibition - big success Faberge Museum. It was also a smart marketing project. If you look at the viral videos that Facebook distributed, you will see who exactly advertised this exhibition, who said which painting he liked best. These were exactly the media personalities that the creative class focuses on. The success of Serov's exhibition and the success of Frida's exhibition have a different nature. But for me, both of these successes are gratifying, because they indicate an interest in art.

This interest is probably aroused not only by the aesthetic appeal of the paintings of Serov or Kahlo. This is also social phenomenon. What does it consist of?

The Tretyakov Gallery is a well-visited museum. But in the case of Serov, there was a geometric increase in visits. Obviously, there was a coincidence of several factors that ensured the success of this exhibition. Firstly, the quality of the items presented. Secondly, the fact that Serov is known to everyone. I'm sure the same crowbar would have been used on Repin. It will probably be based on Aivazovsky and Shishkin. We don't have many artists who have created a holistic image. When you say “Serov girl”, you understand what we are talking about. This is not given to every artist. There is a coincidence of aesthetic and social factors. All generations remember Serov from school. Russian people are still programmed by the 19th century. If you ask ordinary person to name the ten best Russian paintings, I suspect that eight of these ten will be the Wanderers, plus Bryullov and Alexander Ivanov. "Black Square" will only get there because it is promoted. In this sense, we are still a very conservative country. So the success of such exhibitions is ensured by tradition. And with Frida Kahlo, this is already some kind of new success, this is media success.

The mass public is a phantom

- Who is the mass public? What are her social, aesthetic, ideological needs?

I don't think there is a mass audience. The mass public appears as a crowd at Serov's exhibition. But if we talk about the public of artistic events, then this public is very heterogeneous within itself.

- So you think that the mass public as a social monolith does not exist?

Yes, I think so. The public is different. It becomes mass precisely when it presents itself as a public. That is, when we see her. And when these people sit in front of the TV or ride on a tram, they are not the public yet. There is a wonderful book by the American art critic Thomas Crowe, “The Artist and the Social Life of Paris in the 18th Century,” one of the basic books in the social history of art, where he, in particular, analyzes the process of the formation of the public as a phenomenon. And it turns out that the public is not all those who came to the exhibition or concert. The public is people who have their own needs and expectations. With these demands and expectations, exhibition visitors invest in this or that artist, and not only because he draws well, but because in him they see the embodiment of their moral, aesthetic and even political views. And within the public there are quite clearly distinguishable groups. The mass public is a kind of phantom, the fruit of our desire to bring people who are to one degree or another interested in art to some common denominator.

- And to whom does mass culture appeal then? Doesn't he appeal to a certain cultural community?

Let's clarify what we are talking about. Are we talking about an audience that perceives art as something localized and of great value? Or about the audience that listens to pop stars? In the second case, we are dealing rather with an economic mechanism that works on people’s expectations and satisfies these expectations, which is absolutely necessary. When urbanization occurred and a person lost what was folklore, this person needed to sing, dance, and somehow broadcast his experiences. Love, hate, separation, mother, wife, children... Chanson is about this, about the eternal. And mass culture satisfies these needs very well. But if we talk about the public who goes to exhibitions, the gradation here will be different. Here we will divide people by cultural background. Serov unites everyone, but Malevich no longer exists. In this sense, I am more for the search for differences than commonality.

Proletkult is a radical embodiment of the European tradition of bringing art closer to the common man

The Proletkult slogan “art to the masses” - was it not deliberately utopian and hypocritical? What was the goal of Proletkult? To introduce the broad masses to high art? To awaken the artist in the proletarian himself?

Like everyone social project, Proletkult was aimed at the masses and really had an impact on them. By the way, Lenin, into whose mouth Clara Zetkin put the slogan “Art belongs to the people,” was an ardent enemy of Proletkult. But not because Proletkult barbarously simplified everything and everyone, but because the leader of the world proletariat saw in Proletkult the danger of the emergence of an alternative communist - but non-Bolshevik - organization under the control of its leader Alexander Bogdanov. The very idea of ​​“art for the masses” is a radical embodiment of the European tradition of bringing art closer to to the common man. This tradition arose in the 18th century and was implemented in the 19th century. Let's remember the Belgian folk houses, which were built by Van de Velde, the most exquisite master of Art Nouveau. Imagine that Fyodor Shekhtel would build not only Ryabushinsky’s mansion, but also workers’ clubs. Recently, Giles Waterfield, an English specialist in the history of museums, gave a lecture at our university about English museums of the second half of the 19th century. It turned out that in Liverpool, Manchester, in these terrible factory cities, based on the experience of which Engels wrote about the situation of the working class in England, the elite themselves began to chip in, build beautiful buildings and buy paintings for them. These buildings were intended almost primarily for workers.

Art belongs to those who are willing to talk to it. To those who have a need for art, no matter how it is determined

They created city museums, which were dependent on the city, but more often - sponsors, and which were aimed specifically at the mass public. All this was invented by English entrepreneurs. They bought educational art. The paintings they acquired depicted sentimental and moralizing scenes: how one should behave, how one should live; national landscape, some soul-saving things... It was a great social holiday. Or take Germany during the Bismarck era, when one of the most popular magazines, “Art for Everyone,” was published there. I don't think the audience for this magazine included a significant number of the working class, but the petty bourgeoisie, artisans, teachers, intelligentsia were certainly readers of this magazine. It was a mass magazine with a very serious program. And the Bolsheviks, following the lead of their ideology, simplified the problem of introducing the people to art, which had been standing for a long time, and not only in Russia. The Bolsheviks, generally speaking, took art seriously because they were afraid of it. And Bogdanov, the ideologist of Proletkult, wrote openly in 1918 that a proletarian who visits the treasury of art of the past is defenseless before its charm and is literally physically infected by it. Proletkultists believed that by looking at capitalist art, you can become imbued with capitalist ideology. Strange as it may seem, they belonged to the Hegelian tradition of understanding art as the embodiment of the spirit of a nation, which at the same time is capable of directly influencing its mentality. The Bolsheviks, of course, were hypocrites when they said that art belonged to the people. They primarily sought to manipulate consciousness, and not to introduce the proletarian to art. Socialist realism served the same purpose.

- How does today’s mass culture in Russia, in your opinion, differ from the mass culture of the late USSR?

To a certain extent, nothing. The same people - Pugacheva, Kobzon... Mass culture is a brutal world. World difficult relationships. But here it has somehow become very preserved. Whereas ideally this is a rotation, this is a struggle, this is a wheel of fortune. Today you are on top, tomorrow you will be thrown down. To hold on, you need to try to be first. The model industry in this sense is the Western one. But it seems to me that we lack fresh faces and ideas. Or they don't get access to a truly wide public. But at those levels of mass culture that do not have access to federal television, I'm sure there is some needed diversity and renewal.

Art should be felt, not understood

What is elite art? Or is real art inherently elitist? What is not elitist is not art, but mass culture?

Similar approaches to art have existed at all times. But, frankly speaking, I don’t see much drama in the confrontation between the elite and mass art. Most of the great masters, for example, of the 17th century experienced success during their lifetime - they were recognized by the elite. And if they were not popular with the “man on the street,” it was because the masses were satisfied with other art - either folklore or temple painting.

- Not everyone can understand and appreciate high art? Is this the lot of educated, thinking people?

There were eras when it was difficult to adequately understand some things. The same Renaissance, for example. Ninety-nine percent of contemporaries simply did not understand Dürer’s great engraving “Melancholia-I”. This is a complex intellectual statement, for an adequate understanding of which one must have a whole set of knowledge, including occult philosophy. Such things are always tailored for an enlightened audience. All the treatises of the 17th century claim that intellect is needed to understand art. And only in early XVIII century, in the work of Abbot Dubos, the idea appears that art appeals to the senses and should be perceived by the senses. And today we live with the conviction that art must be felt, not understood.

If you ask the average person to name the ten best Russian paintings, I suspect that eight of those ten would be The Wanderers, plus Bryullov and Alexander Ivanov. "Black Square" will only get there because it is promoted

Do representatives need high art in expanding your audience? Or can they be satisfied with the attention paid to them by real connoisseurs and experts?

There is no artist who does not crave universal success.

- But a symphony orchestra cannot fill stadiums.

Maybe. I'm just not sure that there will be good sound. Glyndebourne Opera Festival symphony concerts on the lawn of Central Park in New York... This is a performance, this is a social event. People come to listen to Mozart, Beethoven... It's great.

Why shouldn’t a middle-income person buy a print of an engraving from an artist?

Does art belong to the people only to the extent that it is a commodity? And only when people buy this product?

No, people are not solvent enough to buy art. Art in general is an expensive pleasure.

- I mean buying entrance ticket, and not the paintings of Durer or Gauguin.

Exists a large number of artists who are not sold in galleries. But I want to say not about tickets to the exhibition, but about the fact that we have not yet created a culture of direct consumption of art, when you can find an artist you like and buy some painting from him. There is no middle link between those who buy a ticket and consume art symbolically, and those who purchase Chagall or Picasso at auction. Although, why shouldn’t a middle-income person buy an engraving or canvas from an artist? After all, you can buy the real thing. The engraving, limited to sixty copies, is an original work. You will look and rejoice, build an everyday, absolutely personal dialogue with the thing that belongs to you and is constantly present in your home. As for the financial accessibility of museums... I believe that the situation here is not so catastrophic. Although museums have to periodically organize “open days” for pensioners - and this is absolutely necessary in our conditions.

There is no art without a consumer

- So who really owns art? Maybe to the artist himself and no one else?

Let's imagine a careless artist who creates paintings, never sells them to anyone, and never exhibits them. This is a plot for a horror movie.

- Art cannot exist without a consumer?

Certainly. Especially because art has a lot of functions. Now we have agreed with the idea that art satisfies primarily aesthetic needs. And before that, for centuries we lived in the understanding that art serves the church, exalts the sovereign, formulates philosophical statements, illustrates literary works or traveler accounts. The question "is it art or craft?" has always existed. And I decided differently in different eras. Let's say, in the era of Leonardo they argued which was better - sculpture or painting, what was higher - the craft of a painter or a jeweler? Disputes on this score were very serious.

Benvenuto Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci would not have agreed. And we are already dealing with the results of these disputes, and our time has its own intellectual battles. But in any case, art without a consumer does not exist.

- And in this sense, art belongs to the people?

Art belongs to those who are willing to talk to it. To someone who has a need for art, no matter how it is defined. If you are able to change internally, art will greatly help you with this.

Business card

Ilya Doronchenkov is a researcher of Western European and Russian art, dean of the Faculty of Art History at the European University in St. Petersburg. Regular guest of the TV program “Rules of Life” on the “Culture” channel, lecturer educational portal"Arzamas".

Graduated from the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. I.E. Repina. Specialization - foreign art of the 19th century; art history and art criticism; perception of foreign art in Russia. Main research interests: perception of foreign art in Russia (second half of the 19th - first half of the 20th century), history of literature about art, artistic consciousness of Russian emigration, art and Russian literature.

“The museum boom, which has somewhat faded amid the economic crisis, has nevertheless lasted for several decades in Western countries. If we are guided in the future by such a cultural-economic model, then, I think, we must take care of the reproduction of the class of bearers of meaning, who is the intelligentsia, including art historians,” says Ilya Doronchenkov.

Original taken from avderin c Art belongs to the people. Part I

In Soviet times, we were constantly told that art should (simply must!) belong to the people. They say that in capitalist countries it serves the ruling classes, and in the Soviet country it satisfies the aesthetic needs of the working people. For example, this palace was built in the century before last for a bloodsucking landowner, and here we have ordinary proletarians being treated. Looking at the filthy, magnificent palace, turned into a cesspool for drunks, I understood that something was wrong here. And that it would be much more correct to keep these people away from this palace.
Then I grew up, I became acquainted with artists - and I became acquainted with the Soviet system of serving art to the people. Well, as for a designer working in production, it’s understandable. Although, explain to me what the design department at AZLK was doing if the Moskvich model range changed every twenty years. It’s also clear with the architects, their task was to fit a toilet into a standard plumbing cubicle, where even a standing person could hardly fit. Sculptors sculpted Lenins, who stood in all housing offices, schools, in general - everywhere and everywhere. In each regional center, Vladimir Ilyich stood in front of the cathedral (if it was not demolished) or in front of the district council (built on the site of the cathedral) with his hand outstretched. It was he who was the main breadwinner, so to speak, benefactor, of Soviet sculptors.
It’s also unclear why art universities have produced thousands of easel painters. Who sat in their workshops and smeared something. In order to get into the Moscow Surikov or St. Petersburg Repin Institutes, you must go through a multi-stage, multi-year selection process. If technical students are mostly yesterday's schoolchildren, then the path to an art university often stretches for years. First art school, then college, then a couple of unsuccessful applications - and it’s good if you managed to get into the coveted institution. Before family and children appeared.
Then, after graduating, it took years to get into the Union of Artists - it’s like defending a candidate’s thesis. And she gave a lot of things in those days. The right to a workshop - even in the basement. Opportunity to travel to creative houses. Even with a toilet in the hallway. But the main thing is guaranteed procurement of work from the state. Even to this author no one personally ordered anything, then once in a while, special purchasing commissions selected several works from all members of the union. The pay was quite decent. And with this money, many artists, without worrying, lived until the next purchase. If the money ran out earlier, they wrote to the Art Fund and applied for material assistance. Those who were truly in need were usually not turned away. This was the system.
You may ask, where did this work go later? Museums have always lacked exhibition space for masterpieces. In the apartments of Soviet citizens, paintings were a huge rarity; in schools and institutes they did not hang in the corridors... Where did everything go?
In each regional city there was usually an old, crumbling church with a sign “Reserve ... of the regional organization of the Union of Artists.” It was in this storeroom that the purchased paintings were placed along the walls on racks. After the first good rain, they were flooded with water through the thin roof and broken windows. A commission was assembled, the moldy canvases were written off and thrown into the trash. But, having received the next tranche of money from the budget, we went to purchase the next batch. To put it under the same broken windows... Well, something didn’t have time to rot and was bought by the collective farm for a new cultural center... Or by the factory - for the director’s office. This is service to the people.

|

Comments (9)

(no subject)

from:
date: Jul. 9th, 2012 11:19 am (UTC)

Sorry, but you simply did not understand (or deliberately distorted) the meaning of Lenin’s quote.

“Art belongs to the people. It must have its deepest roots in the very depths of the working masses. It must unite the feeling, thought and will of these masses, elevate them. It must awaken the artists in them and develop them.”

Please think about it and don’t write more nonsense. Your personal experience- this is not yet the history of the country.

|

(no subject)

from: avderin
date: Jul. 9th, 2012 11:25 am (UTC)

The history of a country is a collection of many personal and very different experiences. Including mine. You write that I perceive Lenin’s words incorrectly. And based on the facts in my notes, do you have anything to object to?
I never understood how wretched Khrushchev types, countless leaders with an outstretched hand and canvases rotting in storage rooms can awaken artists among the masses.

| |

(no subject)

from:
date: Jul. 9th, 2012 11:55 am (UTC)

1. Fortunately, the history of the country is not the cumulative experience of ordinary people, but the history of great events and deeds.

2. Because you don’t see anything else (or didn’t want to see).
In the USSR in all periods of history there were a lot wonderful artists and sculptors. Their works hung at exhibitions and in museums, stood in squares and gardens, and to this day many are there. In my house and in the houses of our friends (ordinary people, techies and military men), paintings on the wall were not some exotic rarity. Schoolchildren from who knows how far away were almost forcibly taken on excursions to Moscow and Leningrad, taken by the ear to museums. “Wretched Khrushchev types”, by the way, were copied by British (and not only) architects in the 80s as the most effective type of development in working-class areas. As an architecture student, I traveled half the country for summer internships at government expense. In the city of one and a half million people where I lived and live, there were three monuments to Lenin: one in full height, the second - a head made of granite, and the third, tiny in a gymnasium suit, stood in front of some school... there was also a bust of Kalinin - these are “countless leaders” ? As you can see, there will be other experiences based on your experience.

And when there is a desire to smear something with mud, there will always be mud, of course. But the meaning of this is completely unclear.

| |

(no subject)

from: avderin
date: Jul. 9th, 2012 12:45 pm (UTC)

Regarding the Lenins. They were on the territory of every plant. Usually: in front of the checkpoint, in front of the plant management, in the assembly hall, in the cultural center, in the workshop red corners, etc. I don’t remember a single factory (with at least a thousand employees) without several V.I. And also institutes, schools...
In Soviet times, there were very talented and even sought-after authors. I even knew some of those whose works hang in the Tretyakov Gallery personally.
But here you are, an architect who has worked for several decades in a city of one and a half million people. Have you managed to implement many interesting original art projects in your life? So that colleagues would look and say: Yes, so-and-so did that. I recognize his handwriting! (As sometimes recognized, works by Shchusev, Burov or Shukhov.) Nowadays, not all architects build sports palaces or residential complexes, but sometimes you go into a small store or stop at a gas station - and you realize that they were designed by a talented person. Do you have such work? Did the Soviet government give you personally the opportunity to realize yourself professionally?

| |

(no subject)

from:
date: Jul. 9th, 2012 09:08 pm (UTC)

Yes, I'm not that old. He graduated from the institute in 1991 and managed to work as an architect for only two years: yes, he mostly “tied” standard projects, but these projects were developed by excellent specialists to ensure the best possible more people with comfortable housing and quite suitable for normal life, I live in one myself, and if they’re not palaces, mass construction cannot look any different. But even when I worked before college (at a construction site, at a factory, at a design institute), I saw the same thing everywhere: those who loved their work achieved success, and the “relaxed” (nowadays they would be called snickers) locked themselves in the back rooms and cut themselves in work time into preference, complaining to each other about the bosses and the injustice of the system.

But I repeat: You still did not understand Lenin’s quote. And it's worth a try.