The art belong to the people

The man was suspicious of a harsh appearance to my attempt to penetrate the press conference on the occasion of the opening of the new Galileo Cultural and Exhibition Center: in the list transferred to him by the organizers, there was only the surname of the Master of Culture of the Gazeta. I had to call the editor - make sure that Evgenia Sinva is still in the workplace. As it soon became clear, the list of names on pieces of paper at the entrance was, one might say, a pipe dream of the organizers. Having passed the cordon, it was possible to make sure that there would be no press conference: few of the metropolitan journalists dared to overcome the distance from their editorial offices to the Dubrovka metro station, where plastic arts would flourish from now on.

The tradition of equipping exhibition spaces in industrial or simply non -repaired buildings gradually rooted. I recall the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (the first - in the luggled former Museum of Lenin, the second - at the construction sites of the Central Department Store and the skyscraper in Moscow City), which recently calmed down the “Factory Project”, garages of “artillery” and “Vinzavod”. But all these are the foci of art of the most excessive. The example turned out to be contagious or just a queue came up - only now for the role of the curator of the first exhibition “Galileo” on Sharik Podshipnikovskaya, Irina Efimovich -Pesukh, a person of other addictions, was invited. For many years, she worked in the Moscow Union of Artists, headed his exhibition directorate, and the last six years of existence of the USSR worked as a leading expert at the Department of Trade and Export of the All-Union Artistic and Industrial Association named after sculptor Wuchetich. In 1991, she created the Gallery "Today".

Whether this gallery exists today is difficult to understand. Strictly speaking, not one of the domestic galleries is in the legal sense, and, for example, participation in art fairs is equated with our outbound trade of non-food goods. So you can only talk about the noticeability of the gallery in the everyday exhibition process. Since the authors with whom Mrs. Efimovich is accustomed to work is still by ear, we can say that, in any case, the shadow of the Gallery "Today" is still hovering over the exhibition venues. And the current Russian Metaphor project also resembles the branded “today's” names Natalia Nesterova, Kirill Mamonova, Tatyana Nazarenko, Irina Starzhenetskaya and other so -called seventy people. The exposition on the walls of a direct corridor leading somewhere in the bowels of the capitalist labor enterprise (they say, even functioning), the sensational exhibition of more than twenty Moscow painters, sculptors and graphs, and at the end of Soviet life, arranged in the side halls of the second floor of the Central House of Artists. Only then was it about discoveries, now, first of all, about the repetition of the passed. At the vernisage in Galilee, one of the managers-building managers with Paphos said that the paintings will “bring optimism” to workers in a hurry to work. So I see: crowds of spectators before the sculptures of Leonid Baranov at seven in the morning.

03/29/2007 The material was published in the newspaper No. 57 dated 03/30/2007.