This bit from an article in the sunday NYT on artist Ilya Kabakov’s (triumphant?) return to his native Russia for a retrospective at the Hermitage Museum got me thinking again about the low place art is afforded in contemporary culture:

It was a conflict between two kinds of culture, and one is more popular, he said. Oleysa Turkina, a young curator from the Russian Museum, took issue. “Kabakov is much more important now than Paul McCartney,” she said hotly. “Maybe in Soviet times, when a McCartney concert seemed impossible, it would have been the other way around.”

But few of her contemporaries, ambivalent about reminders of the Soviet past, would agree. “Does Kabakov Really Exist?” asked a headline in the magazine Afisha. “People in this generation don’t know Kabakov,” the writer declared. “They don’t understand him, and I’m one of them. I don’t love Kabakov, and I don’t know Kabakov.” The 5,000 tickets to Sir Paul’s concert, on the other hand, quickly sold out.

I suppose I was hoping it was only an American problem, but this article would suggest otherwise (though at the end it mentions record attendance for the show). I have a fantasy (built from some ignorance) that in Europe (and other parts of the ‘old world’) art is given a higher status than in America. I’m wrong? Or am I reading to much into this article?

It’s very important that artists not attempt to broaden art’s appeal by making it more like entertainment. This would result in the eventual disappearance of art. permanent link to this post