Translated material
the case is not under jurisdiction"
Daniil DONDUREY, sociologist, editor-in-chief of the magazine “Art of Cinema”:
-- Recently, culture has been used as a laboratory platform for testing future dramas of election campaigns and ideological battles of 2007-2008. This also applies to the inflated story around Vladimir Sorokin’s libretto at the Bolshoi, and the discussion regarding the preservation of monuments, and the discussion of the legality of the return of the Baldin collection, etc.
Society is being carefully prepared for a normal perception of prohibitions, to understand, under the guise of discussing moral principles, the legality of introducing censorship. At the same time, neither society’s loyalty to violence, national and religious intolerance, nor the speeches of fascists are ever discussed. All this does not cause any media attention or reaction from the authorities (with the exception of the famous speech of 20 deputies regarding the closure of Jewish organizations).
I am convinced that all these social unrest have nothing to do with cultural problems, with the difficulty of perceiving modern artistic ideas. The task is to bring millions of citizens corrupted by television pop to the conclusion that any political prohibitions can be introduced in a sphere of high culture that is incomprehensible to them. How can the presenter of a federal television channel in a Sunday evening program put the question of whether opera should be banned to a vote of the nation? How is such a question even possible? How can the leader of the ruling party, Lyubov Sliska, suggest that the president and prime minister go to the theater to ban the performance? How is this possible?
All these are the most dangerous symptoms, and they have nothing to do with art. Their appearance speaks of the revival of terrifying cancerous tumors, which previously concerned not culture, not theology, but life itself and which have repeatedly brought our country to great bloodshed.
Alexey SLAPOVSKY, writer, screenwriter:
“It’s terrible when in our thoroughly criminal society people are judged not according to the law, but in fact arbitrarily, choosing victims at random. And arbitrarily, as you know, from the word “arbitrariness”. This selectiveness of judicial prosecutions cannot but outrage. As if we don’t have heads of cultural institutions who rent out premises intended for completely different purposes, for strip bars, casinos, metal repair shops and potato storage facilities. Here we are talking about obvious bias, we are talking about tastes, and tastes are not a matter of jurisdiction.
Olga SVIBLOVA, director of the Moscow House of Photography:
— I believe that this is a monstrous decision, and this process, just like the pickets near the Bolshoi Theater about “Rosenthal’s Children,” is obscurantism that is advancing in an even front and which seems to me dangerous both for culture and for the life of the country . I believe that people who organize exhibitions are responsible for this, and, of course, what they exhibit and the very context in which the exhibition takes place matters, but in a civilized state you can terminate the contract with them if it comes to about a government institution, but judicial measures cannot be applied to them. You don’t have to go to exhibitions, and in general, not many people go to them, but turning the story of an exhibition into a show, like those that took place in the 30s, is unacceptable.
At the same time, it is clear to me that smashing an exhibition, damaging works and painting walls, as the provocateurs who started the trial did, is just hooliganism, for which punishment must be imposed in accordance with the article of the Criminal Code.
The history of art knows many examples when works that later became classics met with an aggressive attitude from a certain part of society during their appearance. These lessons should not be forgotten. Art must be treated with care, and even in cases where the artist makes an unjustified extreme gesture, it is better to try to understand it or ignore it altogether, which is the greatest punishment for a person of art.
In the civilized world, judging art is entrusted to professionals. The experts, whose opinion, by the way, was presented in this case, were not listened to.