Word: western
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fling with materialism is problematic in a country that has officially scorned materialism and has trouble producing enough basic goods, much less luxury items. Even such Western staples as cars, refrigerators and washing machines are in chronically short supply. As a result, well-off Soviets often have much more money than they need for smaller indulgences, including restaurant meals, videos and stereo gear. "Money slips through our fingers," says Vladimir Ivlev, chairman of a Moscow clothing cooperative that pays him a monthly salary of 2,000 rubles...
...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...
...looking, torn and reworked canvases, which had stood well out from the ruck of young artists in last year's Venice Biennale, made as much as $75,000. Under the circumstances it is hardly surprising that a growing number of Soviet artists, once they have signed up with a Western dealer, circumvent the whole wearisome apparatus by going to Paris or New York City, making their art and then going back...
...Western collectors want the kind of mildly academic images of birchwoods in mushroom season, gymnasts and cosmonauts that members of the Artists Union tend to produce. They want what they are used to: late modernism or post- modernism, a souvenir of glasnost on the wall. Thus, since the Ministry of Culture is the conduit for modernism to the West, it has become a de facto rival to the Artists Union -- a switch that has caused a good deal of heartburn in the union's ranks...
...idea the Western market tends to promote, that the Soviet Union is a mine of little-known contemporary pictorial genius, is mostly sales talk. Stalinism deformed or aborted two generations of artistic talent, and no culture recovers so fast. The sense of a time lag is acute to the visitor. Certainly, there is no shortage of artists doing earnestly secondhand versions of last year's, or last decade's, Western model. But there is also some extremely serious talent: Natalia Nesterova, for instance, with her brooding groups of figures, locked in thick, silvery paint and dense with melancholy...