WORDS/FAKE WORDS: Part VII – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Our magazine in close collaboration with LISTE Art Fair, as part of our media partnership on a regular basis, begins a new column in response to the social, political and economic situations, occurring globally, the dimensions that begin to take and the way that all these affect contemporary art and art world. For 3-4 times every month, we are putting questions and concerns to influential people in the art world, setting a discussion, bridging the thoughts, worries, concerns and searches of all of us for the present and the future.
As a reference point the rise of neo-conservatism and the sneaky way that are violated and restricted individual and social freedoms globally, which are the result of hard struggles of the past, we put our relevant question. In the Part VII, we have Answers from: Peter Blaeuer (Director LISTE Art Fair) and Denys Zacharopoulos (Greek Art Historian & Theorist, Artistic Director of the Athens City Pinakotheque).

By Efi Michalarou & Dimitris Lempesis

Portrait Denys Zacharopoulos, Photo: Gitty Darugar

As a result of the sociopolitical problems in the recent years, more and more conservative governments are coming to the fore, culminating with the victory of Donald Trump in U.S.A, the rise of the radical right across Europe and the new walls that rise in various regions of the globe, it has created a strong tendency of neo-conservatism that undermines and hacks away at the civil rights and freedoms. Do you consider that the whole situation may negatively affect the art world and the artists? What implications it will take in the future?

Peter Blaeuer (Director LISTE Art Fair): The current situation will influence art in both positive and negative ways – just as, generally speaking, social circumstances have an influence on art! But not all art addresses political or social questions. There will be artists who practice a type of “self-censorship;” others will conform to the “demands” of certain governments or also believe in those new attitudes. The reasons are many and varied. Some people are afraid for their lives or are afraid of acts of repression against family or children as well. In contrast, the current situation will motivate and mobilize other artists, and these new circumstances will be visible in their works. They will become more radical and more political.

Denys Zacharopoulos (Greek Art Historian & Theorist, Artistic Director of the Athens City Pinakotheque): We are living in tremendously disorienting years, the rise of the far-right is a result of the neo-conservatism, which originates from the lifestyle culture that on the one hand distained every open and free debate. On the other, essential political artistic and economic notions became subjects for speculation and self-promotion, not for an ideological collision. A lot of people make the case of anything the thing that is widely favored; not what they really believe.

As a result, more and more intellectual people are not consistent in their beliefs, but in their pocket and their involvement in any form of power. On the other, more and more people with major work, have been disdained because of a populism that is neither right nor left, but has prevailed as an ideological leveling of the whole cultural field. It does not matter if you are rightist or leftist, because there is no content. When the majority is willing to support brinkmanship and ready to demolish entire conquests that the democratic world gained with his own blood. We end up equating everything and abolishing the role of the intelectual.

The Bourgeois Democracy and its intellectuals have taken enormous steps to protect human rights and gain access to education, equality, progress and justice in society. Besides the left-wing thinking and the left-handed intellectuals, they also come from Bourgeois Democracy, they who did not get involved in the gearwheel of bureaucracy and nomenclature, also contributed to the development of critical thinking, the struggle for social justice, the universal human dimension of freedom and resistance, these are fundamental values of the great 20th Century education. Which I see that in one day turned the page backwards.

We are living a transition period, and unfortunately the art plays a minor role, art has been replaced by big events and I do not speak about Documenta. I positively stand for Documenta because it’s a child of the 20th century education and one of the few that they have not been sold out. No one is willing to support an artist, a project or an idea, but they are ready to support big events and the contractors who will come to make cultural events that art, literature, love, eros, dreams, have become products, very expensive products, luxury products rather than basic human values. Ιt’s like to say that in order to dream you have to take drugs, this is what the teach the young generation, idolizing the power of money instead of talking about poetry. We are selling chewing gums to all mankind. Culture has become a contract, this is a global policy. How can you deal with this impasse? Ultimately Donald Trump is Jeff Koons’s masterpiece and doesn’t not belong to someone it belongs to every one of us, because we all pay for it and probably very expensive.

Media Partner on a regular basis of LISTE Art Fair