Word: artes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...clincher is the Soviet Union's shortage of hard currency, combined with the Western art-dealing system's devouring search for new product. At last, modern art has a real party use: it brings in sterling, dollars and marks. Scores of Western dealers are swarming over the Moscow studios. They buy through the Ministry of Culture, which generally keeps 40% of the purchase price and passes on 10% to 15% to the artist in hard currency, which can be spent only outside the U.S.S.R., and the rest in rubles. Payment is always slow, and then there...
...auction of Soviet contemporary art held, amid vast hype, by Sotheby's in Moscow last July was seen by the West as a vindication of dissident artists but by many of the artists themselves as divisive and even dispiriting. Some lots went for unheard-of sums; the painter Grisha Bruskin, whose work had been comfortably selling in America for just over $40,000, saw a large multipanel piece called Fundamental Lexicon go for $415,000, an event that caused much skeptical talk both inside and outside the ministry. Landscapes by Svetlana Kopystiansky, and her husband Igor's assemblages...
...younger artists squat. Some work in crumbling tenements scheduled for $ demolition, dank shells with tangles of extension cords carrying bootleg electricity up their gapped stairwells. Here they agonize about the "spiritual crisis" with which glasnost has confronted Soviet artists -- the sudden conversion of "dissident" art from a talisman to a commodity. One hears 28-year-olds, too young to remember the '60s, waxing nostalgic over the "purity" induced among artists by former repression...
...another sense, all Soviet cinema has become sexy, a novel commodity on the global culture market. Little Vera opens this month in the U.S., after playing the New Directors/New Films series at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in tandem with Boris Frumin's The Errors of Youth, shot in 1978 but just completed this year. Eleven Soviet filmmakers are touring the U.S. with Glasnost Film Festival, whose 22 documentaries include robust exposes on Chernobyl, the Armenian revolt and the war in Afghanistan...
...Palma and others have quoted the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin. For one thing, critical realism, the style of most glasnost films, eschews the bold editing effects and pristine iconography of the Soviet silents. But style is subordinate to message just now: the priority is journalism, not art. To U.S. eyes, the rebels without a cause in an alienated-teen drama like Valeri Ogorodnikov's The Burglar are a sight as nostalgic as Hula-Hoops. But in the U.S.S.R. these films play like bulletins from the front lines. So for audiences at home and abroad, the excitement...