Oh, preservation

The entire end of the last week and two upcoming ones I will have to live a cultural life not only every day, but also several times in the evening. Just once every two years in the spring, a large wave covers Moscow at the same time - the photo -to -photobiennale begins (the festival “Fashion and the style in photography” alternates with it, but it is more chamber). This means that for those who are in any way connected with the photograph, at this time (something about two, or even three weeks), normal life is turned off, and the survival mode is almost turned on-there are usually more than a hundred exhibitions, there can be a dozen vernissages every evening or so. Even if you miss half, it will still be difficult. I am a photographic critic, that is, I write about photographic exhibitions and albums in different publications, including professional ones. For me, all this is very, very interesting, but every evening I do not get tired of thanking the Higher Forces for the fact that the Moscow House of Photography has such an intelligible press service.

Unfortunately, a normally working and reasonably arranged press service, or at least adequate to the world, a press secretary is a phenomenon for domestic cultural organizations is still quite rare. Over the four and a half years of the work of the leading section “Cultural Week” in one of the magazines “Kommersant”, I and my assistants had to call dozens in a month, if not hundreds of such organizations in the search for the simplest facts. Sometimes the crumbs of useful information - about the beginning and end of the exhibitions, about the arrival of this or that celebrity or about the rental of films - had to be obtained almost with the battle: the desired employee of a press service was “outside the reach of the reach”, it was simply not in the spirit and transferred his languid -present attitude to the world to those who called him. This was all the more strange because in most cases we did not at all extract spy information - we did something useful for the organization that we called, posting information about this or that event for free. Of course, such malfunctions did not always happen and, for example, in the film industry, the press service was a much more clearly debugged mechanism than, say, in museums (not to mention, for example, universities), but the frequency of these strange congestion to its readers-listeners depressed.

Of course, the point is not at all that this or that spokesman does not know his business. The point is in some constant malfunctions in working with information in our cultural, region, largely related to one of the main vices of the world of “high” culture - cultural snobbery. I recall one egregious case that happened not with the press service (the spokeswoman was excellent there), but with the curator of the famous Russian museum. The project was interesting, moreover, jointly with a large Western fund, but with which an inexpressible contempt by a person (by the way, a rather famous journalist himself) belonged to those who tried to find out at least some information from him, was very sad. So, one of the people, not the first year writing in the press, quite reasonable articles about exhibitions of classical and contemporary art, he advised, according to her, to read Plato first, and then contact him for comments. Such cases occurred repeatedly, and, in the end, the reception of the project in his homeland was quite sour, which, in fact, was worth expecting. Imagine my surprise when in one of the newspapers I came across an article by the same person who complained that, they say, the critics are wretched, they don’t know anything, the project did not understand him - either the matter is in the West. The idea that he himself provoked a wave of misunderstanding, because he did not bother to clearly and clearly clarify his position on a number of issues, did not even slip through in the article.

Ironically, I saw the same project in Berlin, and I, I remember, struck a polite, competent, calm attitude towards him personally not only for people who were specially trained for these purposes, but also for ordinary museum workers. I also recall the warm welcome that was rendered to me in the same Berlin a couple of years ago a few days before the opening of the grandiose exposition "Faces of the twentieth century of August Zander." I left before the discoveries, called the Martin-Grophius-Bau museum-and I was immediately allowed to erect the exhibition. The two main curators, who had been engaged in the topic for many years in a row, Suzanne Langa and Gabriella Konrat-Shall drove me around the exhibition for about two hours, not releasing from sight for a minute and answering the questions in detail (I think not all of them seemed especially smart). This, however, is the usual attitude to the press in European and American museums. However, I am far from thinking that all the best is happening in the West. Here, say, a couple of months ago, we discussed the issue of “ignorance” of domestic critics with one of the most famous Western art historians and visualists James Elkins , which now prepares a book about modern art critics in different countries of the world. It turned out that the situation in Russia, in fact, is not so bad, for example, when comparing with America due to the specifics of our economic situation (youth with education in humanitarian areas and with degrees is forced not to science, but to related areas).
The fact that information in the modern cultural world is huge capital is to be common that it is even strange to repeat such things. About various kinds of information transmission mechanisms, the role in its distribution of various kinds of networks, including personal networks built from humans to humans, many wrote, starting with simple and simple instructions to graduate students Phil Aggra and ending with the study of social networks Bari Vellman . In this sense, every journalist and every spokeswoman is Pushkin’s “mail horses”, a transfer link from the creator to a potential consumer. Yes, of the ten people you have to talk about your project, the three may not understand the subject at all, two may blow all the information from the press release, and one will write nasty things-however, there will be four more who can figure it out, understand and convey the information to the world. Unfortunately, you will have to work with everyone, to weed out worthy and unworthy by the criterion whether one of them has read Plato, how his voice sounds on the phone and whether he carries his hair on a straight or on a scythe is no longer possible in the modern world.

The idea that contemporary art and culture as a whole do not operate on the criteria of “quality” and “taste”, and the success of a particular project often depends on how much hype can be created around this work is also well known. Read at least the sensational book by John Sibruk “Nowbrow, marketing culture or marketing of culture” last year - a book that, as it seemed, can be used as a manual in the world of “postulture”. However, I do not understand the screams of the horrors of the consumer society, or the complaints that “a starving artist, a dreamer, unable to earn a living for his art, lost his significance as a cultural archetype,” and his place was taken by the “charismatic crook”, “one of the millions of content creators”. It just seems to me that the fact that the “classic values”, the place of which in the dead belly of the museum or in the ghetto for high-gone (which the only ones can choose what is good and what is bad or support the artist dying of hunger), ceased to have indigested authority, this phenomenon is positive. This is what makes us go out into the world around us from our cramped pen and look for simple forms of explanation of the complex, interact with reality and integrate into daily life. But if we do not do this, the world under the eyeballs will be filled with meaningless projects based only on the cod and good possession of “success technologies” precisely in the inability to convey its “high” values ​​to the most ordinary person and, in my opinion, the original cause of domestic cultural snobbery, and not at all in an attempt to maintain the eternal values ​​of past generations in the pure uncomplicated form.