Putin Cracks Down on ‘Extremist’ Russian Art
A violent clampdown on freedom of expression is in full swing in Russia.
In October 2006, British art gallery owner Matthew Bown was arrested in Moscow as he tried to fly back to London. He was accused of carrying contraband.
The prohibited items were not drugs or currency or antiques. They were a series of modern works by an art collective known as the “Dark-Blue Noses,” which he had purchased from Moscow’s Marat Guelman gallery earlier that day and intended to show in London. This is one of them:
The image depicts a semi-nude George Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Vladimir Putin reclining together on a sofa. Bown was allowed to leave the country only after the artwork was confiscated. The day after Bown’s arrest, Guelman’s gallery was attacked and ransacked. He was brutally beaten. Nationalist websites were soon identifying him as an “enemy of Russia.”
You may say it appears that Putin is no art lover, but that would not be correct. He himself is a professional painter. He recently made his first sale, collecting the tidy sum of $1.1 million. Here is the proud auteur along with his masterpiece in an image circulated by ITAR-TASS, the state-owned newswire:
As state-owned propaganda TV network Russia Today likes to point out in its advertising, Josef Stalin also wrote romantic poetry. So Putin is following in a long line of Russian rulers who, expert in the arts, are fully qualified to determine what the nation’s citizens should and should not be allowed to see. How long it will be before Putin decides, like Stalin before him, that certain artists need a bit of reeducation in the gulag is anyone’s guess.
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Kim Zigfeld is a New York City-based writer who publishes her own Russia specialty blog, La Russophobe. She also writes about Russia for the American Thinker and for Russia! magazine and is researching a book on the rise of dictatorship in Putin’s Russia.
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9 Comments
1. Delia:No oil paints for you!
Love,
The Art Nazi
Jun 13, 2009 - 1:20 am 2. Marie Claude:Monkey painting ?
Jun 13, 2009 - 8:45 am 3. Lark:Senor Putin, welcome to the NEA!!
Jun 14, 2009 - 6:48 am 4. Will:Coming to America soon !!,and no laughing matter.
Jun 14, 2009 - 9:27 am 5. Meryl:Isn’t it interesting that Al Franken has consciously clothed himself and been photographed exactly as the artist has presented these fevered images from his own disgusting mind?
Jun 14, 2009 - 11:31 am 6. Justice1:I am sure that no one will agree with me. However, the previous photo with Bush, Osama and Putin is not only sexually perverted but offensive and demeaning. I am sure that Putin probably hit the ceiling when he saw his image depicted as if in the midst of a sexual act with other men. No it was not art.
Jun 14, 2009 - 2:31 pm 7. Lark:It is a rather interesting “menage a tres,” considering that “Bush’s” leg is broken, “Putin” and “Bin Laden” are precariously perched and intertwined, and the crutches are just beyond reach. Any takers on the symbolism of the black socks?
Senor Putin should put plexiglass in that window.
Jun 15, 2009 - 7:09 am 8. Sebastian:Putin is TEN times the man any of our pathetic, Trotskyite, neoconservative, Jacobite, arm-chair revolutionaries ever will be. The US is increasingly exporting gay rights, feminism and social deconstruction at gun point. We are becoming a twenty-first century version of the Napoleonic Army, though our drug-addled, heavy metal soldiers are not as well dressed. What angers a man says as much about him as anything, and it is interesting to see how the neocons who run this site are troubled by any expressions of traditionalism in any society they mean to deconstruct and turn into an enemy.
BTW, what happened to the articles on the fate of Christians in Iraq after their “liberation”? Or are your priorities as “conservatives” to defend and promote debauchery?
What an empty intellectual movement you are – no wonder a Marxist sits in the House White when the opposition are all radical revolutionaries themselves.
Jun 16, 2009 - 9:16 am 9. Matthew Rose:Hello… I see you are writing about art. Hoping you’ll take a look at this open call for art: A BOOK ABOUT DEATH. Exhibition in NYC, opening on September 10, 2009.
http://abookaboutdeath.blogspot.com/
Best, Matthew
Jun 28, 2009 - 6:12 am