Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
“So where do we start?” As I sat in RIGroup, at Boris Mikhailov’s current solo exhibition Historical Insinuations, I heard people asking the same question over and over again. This is no surprise; it says at the door that the show is celebrating the photographer’s 70th birthday, so that most people probably expect something like [...]
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Where is Gursky?
I stood outside of Ekaterina Foundation for about twenty minutes with the other losers. The security was tight and the opening was packed. Everyone was eager to get in. It was an official occasion, a binding confirmation of the art scene’s hierarchy, but without too many artists or intellectuals. Socialites, curators, and collectors were all [...]
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Imagine a provincial late Soviet department store with half-empty shelves, sparse decorations behind the bleary windows. All the goods and appliances are a little dusty and old, held up by welded stand-screens of vertical iron rods falling askance Sixties style. A vacuum cleaner flies through space like a Sputnik. Handbags form suprematist compositions; transistor radios [...]
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A False Memory of Peter Doig
Peter Doig. Photo from Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin
The word capitalism itself says it all. There is nothing to hide. There is no free lunch. Artworks are commodities. It is what it is. Get used to it… Many artists and intellectuals hate such bourgeois bluntness. That’s why they would never go to the Tate Britain’s [...]
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Laminate and phalanstre
Laminate and falaster: cheap Euro-remonts and residual autonomist utopias in the face of a new Bourbon restoration. The Putin years.Laminate is (cf. Wikipedia) is a cheap pseudo-Western material from the 1990s.
Falanster (Fr. phalanstre) stands for Fourier’s utopia.
The elimination of the “wild bourgeois” public sphere of the early post-perestroika has evoked a return to the utopia [...]
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