"The antique market comes generation iPad»

[Vladimir]

Probably the case that the proposal could give rise to the demand.
Just now, for instance, contemporary Western art in Moscow systematically and significantly engaged in three galleries.
Yet some few years ago they seemed desperate "optimistic."

[fross]

Сообщение от Vladimir

is probably the case that the proposal could give rise to the demand. Just now, for instance, contemporary Western art in Moscow systematically and significantly engaged in three galleries. Yet some few years ago they seemed desperate "optimistic".

I do not think that the sentence in this case gives rise to demand.
Accidentally came across an article of Catherine Tar:

 

Three galleries of the museum in search of



Russian art of the twentieth century has evolved into an institutional situation, quite unlike the situation of modernism in the West. In particular, such basic institutions of modernism as an art gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, has never existed in Russian art at the same time.

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In the early twentieth century galleries in Russia were still in their infancy. Although the famous Russian collector Shchukin and Morozov, bought in Paris, works by Matisse and Picasso, the market for contemporary Russian art there was little if at all. Unlike the French Cubists, Russian Cubists could not boast of the terms of Marchand and collectors, in contrast to the Italian Futurists, and they did not seek to create this circle. Like the German Dadaists, Russian artists were free in their forms, not a fetish of easel painting (this queen of the market) and is easily moved to three-dimensional objects (Tatlin), and abstract compositions (Malevich), which certainly nobody bought, or manuscript books, which they themselves are not going to sell: the first edition of this important series for the Russian avant-garde writers printed on the reverse side of the wallpaper and secretly rassovali the pockets of a rival group of poets and artists of the older generation.

This episode occurred in a private apartment, as most episodes in the history of Russian avant-garde. More than a pragmatic Exhibition Association, meant alliances of like-minded colleagues and friends. Artists unite not to sell their work, but to discuss them with each other and to educate ourselves by reading books aloud, and making reports. Therefore, among the Russian avant-garde is not too loud, there were calls for exhibitions without a jury, which would ensure free competition in the market. There were calls for the destruction of the private market at all - the market in which the avant-garde was not competitive. And furthermore, the destruction of all traditional art history, which threatened the very existence of the avant-garde. Russian avant-garde would not depend on the buyer and does not depend on the stories by creating their own, where avant-garde would occupy a central place. For both objectives needed its own museum.

On this dream of any avant-garde. But Russian only saw the goal of implementation. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 destroyed the private market, all the exhibition rooms and the collections were nationalized. The sole guarantor of the existence of art has become the state - within four years a special committee, consisting only of the artists themselves (such as Kandinsky and Malevich) bought about two thousand pieces, creating the world's first Museum of Contemporary Art in many cities, including in remote province .

Artists saw it as creating their own state. Malevich demanded the establishment of a "world team of the Arts", "the embassies of arts in other countries and museums of the" living art "throughout the country. It is this program has been since World War II is implemented in the West: a network of museums of modern art, protected from the dictatorship of mass taste, the system of international forums such as the Venice Biennale, and even as Malevich wrote, "a factory manufacturing parts to carry on the world, the rails' - design as the vanguard of promoting values.

In the USSR everything turned out differently. The artist has received protection from the market from the hands of the authorities, and not from the international community to contemporary art. The authorities soon lost interest in the avant-garde, a project of the Museum of Modern Art was abandoned, and some things got in the province was destroyed or lost. The art of socialist realism was created not for an art museum and a museum of the Revolution, the ideological design of streets and fine art in mass magazines.

Artists who do not agree with this project, trying to return to modernism after Stalin's death in the 60-70th years, reviving the practice of home-friendly meetings and discussions: modernism at this time existed in the form of unofficial art. There were also domestic museums and salons - those few private collections of Russian avant-garde, which survived in the Soviet Union (for example, the famous collection of Kostaki), were obtained by clandestine manner open to the public (of course, the one which is generally aware of their existence). Furthermore, the role played by public libraries in the museum, where with difficulty, but could get western art magazines, and sometimes, if lucky, even steal from them one or two pictures and make a virtual museum in his home. But now the Museum of Modern Art did not exist. Therefore, if the artist in the West usually seeks above all to create something, something in this museum has no Russian artist often wanted to recreate in his work itself is a museum - appropriirovat different style, just as he appropriiroval reproductions from magazines. Or - as was done by Ilya Kabakov in 1980 - thematised museum and collecting as such in the genre of installation.

Gorbachev's perestroika was the cause of the market's first invasion into the territory of Russian art - at the legendary Moscow Sotheby's in 1988 were first publicly sold works by contemporary Russian artists. Buyers were from the West, but there was hope on the formation of its own market. In 1990 he established the first Moscow gallery, representing the newest art. It was called - "The first gallery. After that there were other, and we would naturally expect the addition of the institutional system of the western type - a museum at the helm. However, this did not happen.

Despite the fact that some state museums gradually collect unofficial art 60-80-ies. and the art of today (especially a contemporary art collection, which formally belongs to the Moscow Museum of arts and crafts Tzaritzyno and the Division of the latest trends in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg), so far there is no place that would determine the legitimacy and status of the avant-garde twentieth century. Malevich's paintings can be seen at best only in the last and very little room Tretyakov Gallery (museum of national art, specializing in the realism of the XIX century), and Western art of the twentieth century is not represented almost anywhere. In the absence of the building, where the viewer would have encountered enormous abstract paintings of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Barnett Newman (not this what we call a museum of modern art?) In the visual background in Russia is still dominated by not geometry, and an individual image: although the that part of the monuments to Lenin removed, placed new - not the leader of the proletariat, but, for instance, Peter I, but in the same aggressive fine and essentially pre-modernist vein.

That is against this background and in this context and work in Moscow a few galleries, dealing with cutting-edge art - galleries, which are forced to assume the functions of the museum and its peak this lack of support. Aidan Gallery, XL Gallery and Gallery Gelman are generally recognized as the best.

Background their owners are very different. Aidan Salakhova, which was co-owner of the legendary "The First Gallery (now defunct) and the only one of the three, found a" Russian boom "of 1990-92, when it drove buses gallery (!) With the major Western collectors and swept away everything that was was - an artist herself. Her work, in particular, are exposed in XL. This confusion of roles may seem strange to the Western observer, but in Russia it is in a sense, continues the tradition initiated in the early twentieth century, when the artists themselves have organized the exhibition, funded them, and write for them explanatory texts: the artist throughout the twentieth century, was himself and gallerists, and critics. Marat Gelman, whose gallery has been around for six years - started out as a businessman, but he soon joined the hobby and commerce, founded the gallery. Elena Selina, which has six years of experience gallerist, of which four years - in his gallery XL, an art historian by training.

All three private galleries, rent from the city authorities and do not bring profit, but paying off - though sometimes at the expense of sales jobs that do not appear at trade shows. Prices for contemporary art is now in Moscow is very low (in the West on the same artists are often three to five times higher), but a little shopping done. Until recently bought a large corporation, but is now among the buyers mostly foreigners working in Moscow, plus each gallery has several regular customers from among the "new Russian" - those who are under 40 years of age. It's almost always not collectors, but people who want to furnish their apartment and at the same time express their identity. This national identity - the types of Italy or the work of foreign artists (painters, even with recently had brotherly Ukraine) buy a present-day Russia reluctantly. But the "national" is seen in the naturalism rather than in a modern style that is perceived as "Western." Therefore, the gathering begins with paintings of Russian landscape painters of the XIX century. And only then - buying Italian undulating sofa - new rich suddenly realize that over the last realism somehow did not look.

Buyers often seek through the gallery to get acquainted with the artist, not even to buy his works directly - rather to tie relationships together to drink a bottle of vodka and make friends with an interesting person. It sometimes replaces the purchase - the primacy of personal relationships over any matter typical of present-day Russia. Art market is determined by the senses: people buy what they like and do not realize that twentieth-century collector, if he wants to buy something of value, must usually step on the throat of his own taste and rely on expert opinion. Typically a normal market - the price increases, if the item was published - in Russia absolutely does not work. The presence of large catalogs of exhibitions not convinced, and more - may disappoint. Many buyers want to buy a thing that no one has ever seen (and do not see it). This "erotic" approach leads to the fact that it is impossible to convince the client - the reasons for which he chooses, completely irrational.

Under these conditions, serious picture, interested to contemporary art in Russia had some context (as well as simply vanished and would not have died), can not create their own collections, speaking not so much the sponsors of artists (although it happens ) as the only literate collectors. All three have their own assembly, which they hope to someday pass into a future museum, and now beginning to be used for museum exhibitions and projects (especially in the provinces).

It is in connection with a fatal lack of the Museum of Modern Art as a legitimizing instance, all three have come in at some point to the conclusion that such authority must be found in another space - needed promotion to a different scene, more socially prestigious than the small art scene. The difference in personal background'e dictates different strategies for survival.

XL appeal, which is traditional for Russian unofficial art, to a certain virtual museum that exists in the representations of the curator - Elena Selina, in its exhibition program tries to present contemporary Russian art fullest. But above all, it appeals to the West as some kind of authority "normalcy." This little (name of XL is fully self-irony) gallery in the basement of an apartment house is closest to the international perception of non-profit art space. There is never just exhibitions of works by artists gallery and demonstrates only integrity of the project, which is always Elena Selina (heroically, in two languages) is publishing a brochure with texts of the critics, their own (because she herself critic), and artists. She calls their catalogs, but they have more replicable the status of art objects. In the spectrum of artists who exhibited in the XL, there are still belonged to the circle of the Moscow conceptualist 70-80's (Ivan Chuikov, Igor Makarevich, Irina Nakhova), but many young people who show pictures, videos, installations and performances - always as a software project and are always a very personal project. Sociality and aesthetics, which are engaged in Gelman and Aidan, respectively, are possible here only as a personal myths.

Authority, to which is trying to appeal Aidan is pop scene. The very presence in the art of such figures as Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons, whose natural to see on the cover of Vanity Fair, is the envy of many in Russia, where no one artist can not even become a fashion character. The attic, where the Aidan Gallery, raises many secular people, her gallery more than others is rooted in the world of show business and fashion. In art, which shows the Aidan Gallery, has always maintained the status of "beautiful things", here often demonstrates a "new art" and more photos taken on the computer, sometimes in the style of the so-called "new Russian classicism," which attempts to remove the boundary between artistic and commercial success. Aidan supports the youngest generation (it is - practically the only one on the Moscow stage, who took the trouble to look and, more importantly, to find the interesting young artists), or those in the generation of forty years, who denies the old, going back even to the Soviet time, the dilemma (formal-informal , serious and decorative, Russia and the West).

If Aidan emphasis on aesthetics, the Gelman shows mostly art, which could be called a theme - art, one way or another connected with the subjects of newspaper headlines. This can be seen the tradition that prevailed in Soviet art, but which evidently expresses the deep needs of Russian art in general. Gelman does not attempt to impose Russian society something completely alien to him and probably looking for ways in which this society could accept the new art. When he makes a show about politics (the project "Blackmail" simulate, for example, the modern Russian media in their relation to politics), in fact, he is engaged in a simulation of social relevance, while successfully forging personal connections with government officials (to use them later for propaganda in Russian contemporary art and its values).

Authority to which Gelman appeals for legitimation of contemporary art - is, thus, power. Therefore, he often tries to restore the relationship of art forms with the state, which were under Soviet rule and who can now, for many seem like paradise. Thus, he attempted to institutionalize (officially approved it in power) a list of "progressive" Russian artists (compared to the kitsch, which is often given to an incompetent press for "vanguard" and then, unfortunately, is sponsored by big companies). Even without being a representative government, Gelman feel their social responsibility for what is happening in the culture of the country and therefore, in particular, actively deploys regional projects on building artistic environment in the province and even the former Soviet republics. Just as the representatives of the Russian avant-garde, he believes in the power of social order and seeks to create a lobbying machine on the distribution of these large government contracts than he believes, would do the Ministry of Culture. He himself, however, such an ambitious project has already succeeded - from one to two years in Moscow, opened a new public space, which (for the first time in Russia) will be processed products of modernism - objects and installations by contemporary Moscow artists (project Seating yard ", initiated by Gallery Gelman). This will be another option for an alternate Museum of Modern Art - the museum's live version of which Moscow hopes will not scene, doing without it.

30.10.1998