Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The postsocialist contemporary joins a growing body of scholarship debating the definition and nature of contemporary art. It comes to these debates from a historicist perspective, taking as its point of departure one particular art programme, initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. First implemented in Hungary, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) expanded to another eighteen ex-socialist countries throughout the 1990s. Its mission was to build a western 'open society' by means of art. This book discusses how network managers and artists participated in the construction of this new social order by studying the programme's rise, evolution, impact and broader ideological and political consequences. Rather than recounting a history, its engages critically with 'contemporary art' as the aesthetic paradigm of late-capitalist market democracy.
Synopsis
The postsocialist contemporary uses a historical perspective of Eastern Europe to intervene in a wider conversation about "contemporary art." It revolves around a concrete case in which a program for contemporary art was assembled on the debris of the Berlin Wall by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.
The Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) was a network of twenty art centers active during the 1990s in Eastern Europe. The book argues that this program played an important role in the actualization of the paradigm of "contemporary art" in the former bloc. Its main goal, however, is not to recreate the narrative but to use this Soros-funded art infrastructure as a critical point of inquiry for engaging with key forms that occurred in art during the transition to capitalism. The implementation of Western art institutional models by Soros and other players prompted a radical departure in the region: a departure from an art that (officially at least) provided symbolic empowerment to the masses towards one that affirms the interests, needs, desires, and "freedom" of the private individual acting within the boundaries of the bourgeois civil society and the market.
The book considers the "postsocialist contemporary" in a broader context of late twentieth-century political, economic, and cultural processes of (neo) liberalization, promoting and encouraging more critical historical materialist examinations of "contemporary art"' - the dominant aesthetic paradigm of late-capitalist market democracy.
Synopsis
This book engages with the historical paradigm of 'contemporary art' by examining a programme initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros in the 1990s. The Soros Centers for Contemporary Art played a leading role in popularising the norms and conventions of 'contemporary art' throughout the region.