Monthly Archive: July 2004

In his essay Musealization of the East, Boris Groys lucidly detects a basic problem in the attitude towards the visual arts of Eastern Europe (the former communist states).

He claims that it is not the excessive exoticism of East European art that would cause it not to be musealized in the West because things perceived as foreign and exotic are successfully included in the Western museum environment.

The reason it cannot be understood as art in the west lies in the formal and aesthetic similarity between Eastern “non-art” (the western perception) and Western “art”.

The decisive difference, however, is … Read more

Vladimir Dvornikovic, an enthusiastic Yugoslav, imagined the Yugoslav supra-ethnic entity as a collective voice of the South Slavic “blood and race.”

Since publishing his monumental study on ethno-psychology entitled Characterology of the Yugoslavs in 1939, that marker of identity has disappeared twice: in 1941 as a consequence of invading Nazism, and in 1991 as a consequence of imploding Titoism.

Blood and race were once again tied to language as a distinguishing marker of ethnic particularity.

The latter fragmentation of Yugoslavia through the formation of new state entities arrived as result of the differentiation of the Yugoslav idea through the notion … Read more

Public vs Private: Cultural Policies and Art Market in Central and South-Eastern Europe Conference, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 4 February – 4 April, 2004

Within the framework of the second part of the Balkan Trilogy project, initiated in 2003 by Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, the conference Public vs. Private: Cultural Policies and the Art Market in Central and South-eastern Europe in Ljubljana took place in early April.

The second partner of the conference is the European network project republicart, which organizes a series of conferences and symposia that take place in 2004 in Vienna, Linz, Ljubljana, London, Lüneburg … Read more