MYTH OF PLASTICINE

FREE THEME

I am an agreeable person: and the years are not the same, and tastes, and passions. I like to take a nap after dinner. I swear rarely and never in front of ladies. I love old friends, make new ones, and tolerate everyone else, including those who, having come up with the rhyme "penis" ...

I am an agreeable person: and the years are not the same, and tastes, and passions. I like to take a nap after dinner. I swear rarely and never in front of ladies. I love old friends, make new ones, and tolerate everyone else, including those who, having come up with the rhyme "penis" to the word "Genis", shout: "Eureka!"

Since the end of Soviet power, I have not entered into polemics with it, and there is nothing else to argue about. “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” I say to those who vote for Bush, Putin and Yanukovych. “The journey of 10,000 li begins with the first step,” I reassure the writer who made his debut with How to Kill Pushkin.

However, all good nature comes to an end when I hear a word from which proteins are filled with blood, a hand reaches for the trigger, a pen for paper: “Unwound!”.

Everyone but me knows what that means. The trouble is that I began to guess. In the end, it fell to me to be born in a country where all available forces went to the "promotion" of the regime. I grew up in a landscape where the monuments to Lenin were like mushrooms, and if you think about it, even more. An entire empire worked on our upbringing, which never managed to convince us of anything. The unprincipled Amphibian Man was watched by 40 million viewers, while the widescreen Aurora Volley was watched by two.

We can proudly say that in the entire history of advertising, no one but the communists has ever wasted so much energy on it. Their heirs, however, were convinced otherwise by an immutable historical example. They still regard reality as a product of arbitrariness, a secondary raw material of history. The society that has found a free market is eager to manage it according to recipes copied from the Agitator's Notebook.

Fashionable technologists of success, with the naivete of provincial secretaries of the regional committee, believe in their power over others. It is enough, they argue, to replace the rusty Marxist methodology with a seductive postmodernist strategy. According to the tenets of this philosophical superstition, all prominent figures in our landscape - from Putin to Harry Potter - are soap bubbles, inflated by the gray cardinals of black and white PR. “Everything is for sale,” they say, inflating their price, “but only if we sell.”

Thus, having made an ideological somersault, the new Russia remained true to the old belief about the plasticine nature of reality, which obediently bends under everyone who steps on it in order to “unwind”.

Sensitive to deceit, public opinion for old times hated advertising even before there were goods worth advertising. Having lost their ideological opponent, satirists began to feed on slogans, as before - slogans. The ubiquitous advertising is considered stupid, meaningless and incomprehensibly omnipotent.

I personally encountered this paradox when a Moscow singer with a Cypriot residence permit entered our house without taking off her roller skates.

“How much do you get,” she asked with a wink, “for a review in The New York Times?”

— Custom? I did not immediately understand. - Two years, if caught.

Deciding not to mess with the idiot, she rolled out the door.

In simple-hearted, like arithmetic for beginners, corruption is affected by an archaic belief in the power of words. As a magic spell, secret and overt advertising is endowed with the ability to create homunculi, mirage evil spirits, reaping unearned fame and money. Such magical machinations are called "promotion".

Those who are worse want to be promoted. Those who are smarter prefer to spin themselves. The first are optimists by nature. They live with a bright belief that both a gift is sold and glory can be bought if you know exactly who to hit in the teeth and who to hit in the paw.

According to glossy magazines, advertising is the most prestigious profession. In my childhood, everyone wanted to be astronauts, football players or even butchers. Today they dream of becoming masters of PR, chasers of masks, technologists of glory. It is understandable: making kings is even more interesting than being them. Nothing comes of this, however. The self-proclaimed masters of promotion create their own jealous ranking list, in which only they believe.

To understand the mechanism of this deceit, one must look for the ui prodest, for, as Lenin translated, "whoever benefits is the one to blame." The Soviet government (and, frankly, the entire Russian tradition) was exceptionally favorable to critics who held the position of enlightened co-authors. The fall of censorship, by abolishing the role of ideologue-interpreter, undermined the authority of professionals. Hoping to regain their lost influence, they assure potential customers that they have comprehended the laws of creating success.

A recent example is a list of five masterpieces of the 20th century, compiled from surveys of leading (or rather, what there are) experts. It begins with the "Black Square", but ends with Kulik. This means that Russian art, having missed Serov, Vrubel and Filonov, completed its evolution with the Dog Man.

Incidentally, I met Kulik in Moscow when he was still walking around without a collar. The second time I went to say hello to him was already in New York, where he barked friendly to me from his comfortable cage. Since it is difficult to surprise Soho, especially with old tricks, Kulik did not make much of an impression on America, but in his homeland he became a hero of "curatorial art". But this is the same stupidity as all other attempts to falsify reality, which stubbornly resists the onslaughts of the critics who “unwind” it by not noticing them.

All this does not mean at all that I do not believe in advertising. After all, I've been living in the country that invented it for a quarter of a century. But precisely because America knows better than anyone else about the limits of its power. Advertising is an art, which means it cannot work for sure. If there were immutable laws that guarantee the success of any product - a thing, a product, an idea, a way of life - we would find ourselves in a deterministic universe, subject to the arbitrariness of those who comprehended its rules. In Russia, this gloomy utopia once proved to be untenable. And this is good news. Between someone else's will and our whim there remains a gap of freedom, where an inviolable reserve of values ​​inaccessible to promotion is hidden from the technologists of glory.