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We talked to Vitaly Kurenny, director of the Institute for Cultural Research at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, about why culture and industry remain antonyms for many people today, what the Brezhnev Constitution had to do with it, and whether it is still possible to “sell the manuscript.
– When the term “cultural industry” is heard somewhere, we tend to have pessimistic connotations on a mundane level. We immediately begin to say that culture and industry cannot stand side by side, that as soon as industry emerges, culture dies. In your opinion, how adequate are such assessments when viewed in a more global cultural context?
– The concept of “cultural industry” in this negative perception can be found in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s famous 1947 work Dialectics of Enlightenment, where a separate chapter is devoted to it. The point is this: the cultural industry is an evil spawned by capitalism and modern mass culture. The mass cultural industry is evil because it manipulates consciousness. It is, as the subtitle of this chapter states, a “deception of the masses. This position, a strange combination of the real and the fantastic, is a kind of grotesque.
– Why?
– The work Dialectics of Enlightenment was finished in its basic outlines as early as 1944. On the level of unified state policy the Soviet Union was engaged in this work, Nazi Germany was engaged – with different objectives, of course – but the same could hardly be said of the United States, where the authors wrote this work. Therefore, the claims that Frankfurtians make about the mass culture of market societies are, to put it mildly, misleading.
The purposeful task of manipulating consciousness through culture and art is precisely the task set by prominent Soviet artists such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Eisenstein’s montage technique was designed, in his own words, for an “aggressive” impact that leads the viewer to the “final ideological conclusion” in an experimentally and psychologically verified and mathematically calculated way.
Against this background, the arguments of the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School about the manipulative nature of mass market culture look, to put it mildly, strained. This does not mean that there are no producers who would like to manipulate their consumers, and during wars we see the work of propaganda in all modern countries: the power of the printed press was realized already by Napoleon.
But the lack of a monopoly on cultural policy and cultural production, the inevitable competition that exists in the bourgeois state, all this ultimately dooms these kinds of ventures to failure. Where the principle of open competition applies, there is no basis for the possibility of total and purposeful manipulation.
– So why is it that in Russia the phrases “cultural industry” or “creative industry” provoke such resistance?
– It is not, of course, the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, which few people have read. It’s about the Soviet past. To put it simply, this is because in Soviet society art existed outside the market in the usual sense of the word. Soviet ideology viewed the sphere of culture on two main planes.
As a sphere of propaganda and manipulation, but also as a kind of objective need, in the process of satisfying which one moves from simpler to more complex cultural works, while acquiring more and more developed skills necessary for life in Soviet society.
The early Soviet period, the period of the avant-garde and the Soviet Cultural Revolution, is an era dominated by the avant-garde discourse of “shaping” the new man. The Soviet cultural revolution has quite clear boundaries – this is the period from 1921, when Lenin in his later articles and speeches announces the need to move to a policy of “culturalism”, to 1939, when at the XVIII Congress of the CPSU(b) Stalin announces that the tasks of the cultural revolution have been successfully completed.
It was in the years of the Second Five-Year Plan that the infrastructure of the Soviet state cultural policy acquired a size comparable to its current capacity in Russia – in the number of libraries, clubs, and theaters, whose number grew several times over these years.
– Did the Great Patriotic War affect this process?
– The war and postwar period are, of course, an era of emergency, which should be considered separately. It is not until 1952-1953 that cultural policy and the 1939 agenda are revisited. This is where a very interesting twist comes in.
First, the authorities return to the idea of the development of a “fully developed” or “harmoniously developed” personality as a certain ideal goal that Soviet society strives for. This is not an innovation of Stalin, this is a return to the program of the Bolsheviks, adopted in 1903 at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which declared the purpose of the proletarian revolution is precisely “the welfare and all-round development of all members of society.
The second important change is the sharp decline of the heroic avant-garde discourse of constructing a new man. Culture is relegated to routine functioning and bureaucratized as part of the creation of the world’s first Ministry of Culture in 1953. In his 1952 writings, Stalin characterizes the new phase of the development of socialism in the country as the construction of a society in which “the maximum satisfaction of the constantly growing material and cultural needs of the entire society is ensured. There are two things to pay attention to.
First, there is a very strong anthropological premise here: man is a being who has an objective need to consume culture, and it is constantly growing. This is a very strong assumption, characteristic rather of the Enlightenment and eighteenth century than of the conceptions of man that emerge later, beginning in the nineteenth century.
Second, the concept of “need” is important. The discourse of cultural policy from this point on becomes the discourse of needs and, accordingly, the services that satisfy those needs. A consequence of this turn is also the fact that the resource provision of this sphere loses its priority nature in the USSR, since the priority for the Soviet economy was not the service sector, but the sphere of production.
The notion that human beings, all human beings without exception, have a need to satisfy ever-increasing “cultural needs” is then legally enshrined in the Soviet Constitution of 1977. And if we look at the current Constitution of the Russian Federation, we see that the paragraphs of its Article 44 devoted to culture are somewhat abridged versions of the articles of the Soviet Constitution. The uniqueness of the modern Russian Constitution is that there are no similar constitutional guarantees in this area in any European country.
And in 2020 there are even more, since we have the fourth paragraph of Article 68, which says: “Culture in the Russian Federation is the unique heritage of its multinational people. Culture is supported and protected by the state. In other words, we live in a state with unusually great state guarantees in the field of culture, and we owe this identity to the Soviet past.
– Is that why many cultural figures are so nostalgic for the Soviet era and complain that today culture is becoming a service industry?
– Yes, but that’s what they think for nothing. We owe this transformation – the movement toward services – precisely to the late Soviet period. Interestingly, at this time there was also dissatisfaction with this, the artists sought to return the revolutionary spirit of the avant-garde to art.
There is tremendous evidence of this, such as a collective letter written in 1974 by a group of artists, whose leader was Eli Beliutin, and sent to the Party Central Committee and personally to Mikhail Suslov. In this letter they demand the resignation of Suslov, because he patronizes “bourgeois” art in the USSR, and they also declare the need to return to the “Leninist”, i.e. avant-garde-revolutionary, principles of art.
We see artists striving to raise their status from serving the public to that of an avant-garde detachment with a crucial role in society. Similar rhetoric is found among contemporary representatives of the cultural sphere. For example, the Concept of the draft federal law “On Culture,” which was discussed in 2019, states: culture is a “service” only in the sense that the army, law enforcement, or government is a service to society as a whole.
This is essentially a reproduction of the position of the Soviet avant-garde artists of the 1970s: activity in the cultural sphere is not a service, it is a service that requires a special attitude. Interestingly, even in the Soviet context, it is the convergence of the sphere of culture with the market that becomes the subject of criticism here. In the 1974 letter I mentioned, its authors link the process of the “bourgeoisization” of Soviet art with the fact that artists in the USSR receive unprecedented royalties for their work.
– However, if we leave the conscientious context, how did the relationship between culture and the market develop? Here is an artist who sells himself and an artist who serves – was there opposition here?
– Of course, we know examples of contemporary creators who were not at all focused on making a profit from their creations. For example, Robert Musil wrote his unfinished novel “The Man Without Qualities” for 20 years, what a market. But this is the exception; the rule is the reverse. Whether we take Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, or the iconographers, there is always a certain market.
Not necessarily a mass market. Often artists were supported by patrons and patrons like Lorenzo de’ Medici, but always an expression of the fact that art was needed by someone was also an economic dimension. Alexander Pushkin, from whom we count modern Russian poetry, was also the first Russian author for whom royalties were a significant source of his income.
He very subtly reflected on this problem, recall the famous “Conversation of a bookseller with a poet”: “Inspiration cannot be sold, but the manuscript can be sold. Here is another example from another field. Before the revolution, the village of Mstyora, which we know today as the center of lacquer miniatures, was the largest icon painting center in the country. So, the 2,000 craftsmen who lived in Mstyora produced about two million icons a year – a true mass market production.
But even in Soviet society, where art, at first glance, was fenced off from the economy, there was also a serious market: artists in demand, inscribed into the system of creative unions, could indeed receive very large royalties. The peculiarity of the Soviet system was that there the artist was also protected, who could never count on market success. There were, of course, periods when certain areas of the arts were almost completely shielded from this, as they were seen as the most important front of propaganda.
For example, cinema under Stalin, who had complete personal control over the release of motion pictures. As a result, the release of films in the USSR by the end of his life extremely slowed down. And here is a typical moment: immediately after Stalin’s death, even before the “cult of personality” was exposed, a number of planned films on historical and biographical themes were withdrawn from production. The reason for this is the low demand for them, the audience did not want to watch films about great people, they were more interested in comedy or adventure movies, which began to appear only in the late Soviet period.
– So the market has always acted as an institution that evaluated what the artist has created?
– Of course. Here there is an important transformation that took place with art in the transition to modern society, the society of modernity. It consists of two things. First, art becomes autonomous; it begins to be understood as a special, independent field. Before that, art had never had autonomy anywhere; it was tied to religion, to power, to everyday things, to grassroots entertainment – in the form of a buffoonery.
The autonomization of art took place primarily on a philosophical and theoretical level: an independent discipline, aesthetics, emerged, and the most important stage on the path of this autonomization was the publication of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Art is not only separating itself, but also acquiring a very high status in modern society, as it is perceived as a sphere where the most important modern value – free creativity, which is a source of novelty – reigns supreme. Today, by the way, we see that art is losing its monopoly on this sphere. The two most important concepts of the modern economy are “creativity” and “innovation,” and yet this is nothing more than a democratization of the traditional role of the modern artist as “creator of the new,” as an artistic genius who creates new rules of the game, rather than following existing ones.
The second most important transformation is that art gains a historical perspective, which is expressed in the emergence of the art museum in the modern sense of the word. And this historical dimension extends not only into the past, but also into the future. This is a crucial point, since in parallel with the historicization of art there is also a relativization of its aesthetic appraisal.
It becomes clear that our own appreciation of art is not absolute. A work of art that contemporaries don’t like can be appreciated by generations to come. Van Gogh was poor during his lifetime and his paintings were not appreciated by either the critics or the market. If the market were the only criterion of evaluation in modern society, we would be deprived of the lion’s share of both past and contemporary art. This is not the case because modern society forms special institutions which, while recognizing the autonomy and historical character of art, protect certain segments of it from the market.
– In other words, it is as if they create an environment in which the artist is liberated and can act, so to speak, on his own aesthetic principle without being guided by the market, by local customers?
– Quite right. The most important of these institutions is the museum. Curiously enough, it was the museum that was the space that sheltered the classical avant-garde. This has its own paradox and irony, since the avant-gardists demanded the destruction of the museum. The museum, Marinetti says, is an art graveyard.
Kazimir Malevich echoed him: “Every collection of old things is harmful. But it is precisely avant-garde art, imbued with the rhetoric of mass industrial production, that is ill-equipped to go out into the street – it is simply incomprehensible to the mass viewer.
The elimination of the motley diversity of avant-garde movements in the USSR and the transition to the canon of socialist realism are largely a consequence of the fact that the avant-garde could not fulfill what it constantly called for – to unite art with life. Socialist realism is somewhat closer to folk lubok, it is understandable, but Malevich is not.
This applies not only to the classical avant-garde, but also to contemporary art as such. It can’t survive on the market – somewhere at the vernissage in Izmailovo. For him modern society creates special institutions, museums of contemporary art, art residences, forms its own special market infrastructure, where there are critics, galleries, biennales.
But there is a simple factor – the material capacity of this infrastructure, but even here modern art finds a way out, it becomes fleeting. Artistic performance is something that happens here and now, hence it doesn’t need a room to store it. Again, installation is a fleeting form of contemporary art; it is temporary, not permanent, unlike classical sculpture.
The material was published in the December 24, 2020 issue of the printed version of the newspaper Kultura in the issue’s theme, “The Economics of Culture: How Is Culture Becoming an Industry?”
