IKEA vs Channel One

Assimilation of civilized models begins with appearance - one's own and one's apartment

The avant-garde is either disinterested or asks a high price. Kitsch is always on sale, but inexpensive. It creates the illusion of a quick understanding of complex things that intellectuals struggle with due to general slowness ...

For the same purpose, it is absolutely necessary to get acquainted with the products of the Comedy Club residents and the film Rzhevsky against Napoleon, the programs Let They Talk and Let's Get Married, the work of Stas Mikhailov and Elena Vaenga, the musicals of the Mikhail Shvydkoy Theater and the productions of the Quartet I . It’s not good to turn away in embarrassment when Dmitry Hvorostovsky falls into ecstasy from Ferrero Rocher sweets, and another opera singer, Lyubov Kazarnovskaya, is dragged into latex and painted like an Odessa bandersha. It is foolish to lament that the literature you read is only available in a few stores in the capital, that what you watch has not been shown in cinemas for a long time, and the music - if these are not files, but vintage discs - is bought abroad. The whole company cannot go out of step, one ensign in step. Any intellectual with cycling glasses should remember this. And to cut down on your often not very Slavic nose that the mass culture of modern Russia is built on bright colors, loud sound, simple feelings and big money. Failure to comply with one of these conditions dooms the cultural product to a marginal existence.

A few years ago, the St. Petersburg art critic Arkady Ippolitov wrote a very accurate article “A eulogy for kitchu”, where he spoke about the humanity, comfort, and bodily correctness of this phenomenon. Indeed, originating in the 1870s in the Munich artistic circle to denote a hack work in bad taste, the concept of kitsch underwent a fateful change in the 20th century. Back in 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg substantiated the close connection between avant-garde art and the practice of kitsch. In an environment of a steadily expanding and increasingly well-established market, the opposition of “high” and “low” is being replaced by the opposition of profitable and unprofitable (without any quotes).

The vast majority agrees to consume the product of the lowest quality and does not notice it, and a proportional minority reveals a snobbish unwillingness to adapt their "advanced" ideas to local conditions. No one who diligently guards the boundaries of his circle is interested in the population at least thinking that there are better experts on social problems in the world than the TV presenter Andrei Malakhov, and better artists than the artist Alexander Shilov.

Hence the effect of reducing selection, when each subsequent New Year's concert seems more vulgar than the previous one. On the contrary, mass consumption in our country has already undergone an encouraging evolution. Simply put, people are getting better dressed and getting better furnishing their home. Golden leggings, guipure bodysuits, platinum hair and suede over the knee boots are becoming less and less common on the streets of large Russian cities, and IKEA is opening new stores, testifying to the accustoming of Russians to modest and solid Scandinavian design. I have long ceased to be surprised by the swearing and antics of the district punks performed by people who look like hipsters from good families. The assimilation of civilized models begins with the appearance - one's own and one's apartment. And kitsch on television - well, after all, the program “Full House”, which seemed eternal, disappeared ...