Neo-Academism Tackling the Bull of Modernism
It just wouldn't be the Christmas Season
at BEYOND THE BEYOND without a
bluntly ticked-off Manifesto from our friends
at the New Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg.
MANIFESTO
The situation, in which the political aspect of contemporary art
is becoming more and more significant, has turned artists into mere
illustrators of the ideas suggested by curators. It is curators who
have become true artists. It is they who receive the best exhibition
rooms and museums. It is curators who have created the myth of artist's
insanity and the consecutive necessity of wakeful custody and elaborate
elucidation of artist's creation.
However, curators have little relation to art making, which brings about surrogate exhibitions: on one hand, they call for scandal, on the other - they try to adjust to current political situation. In this situation, museums remind one of the old-time wagons traveling from one market place to another in order to attract visitors
with such miracles as a peregrinate shark-fish, elephant crap or a shagged woman. Such art has always been considered as the low art that has no connection with the high art.
Nowadays mankind has no possibility to see contemporary high art. Has the very notion of it ceased to exist? Why is it only the low art that is put in a golden package and broadly advertised? The sooner we start discussing this, the sooner art will return to its origins and the artist will resume working on purely esthetical tasks.
Today nothing is more radical than painting religious scenes, oil on canvas,
with no postmodernist humor or critique of mores. There is nothing more radical
than to follow the rules of composition, lightning, color rendition being absorbed
by the inner tension of the subject and the pure religious feeling. The fact that
too many people find such understanding of art too outmoded and too simplistic
makes us amazed at how abased is the contemporary art and how egregiously wrong are the people who have led it to the deadlock of contemporary situation.
No one but the active artists of today can change this situation of the 15-minute stupidity everyone encounters in contemporary art. There surely have been centuries in the art history of every country that gave us no art works. Europeans, let us remember our great tradition and start reviving the great culture right now before we lose its last true representatives!
(signed)
The New Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg
