Ekaterina Degot examines retrospective appraisals of post-war art and the negative reactions associated with them.
This lecture, organized as part of the Garage Field Research project If Our Soup Can Could Speak... Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties, will consider art historical perceptions of official art under communism and Mikhail Lifshitz’s aesthetic program as seen today. Degot raises the following questions: “Mikhail Lifshitz was a pointed critic of western Modernism, whose observations and critiques are still relevant, even productive. But how should we react to a positive program? How can we look at Soviet official art of the post-war period without feeling disgust? Which aesthetic assumptions do we need to change? And how can we do it now, when all things Soviet seem like an endless nightmare?”