�鶹����

Please join the upcoming Slavic Colloquium talk entitled “Global Socialist Networks in the Age of Three Worlds: Art and Arbitrage from Mexico to Moscow” by Kevin Platt (Professor, Russian & East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania).

Abstract:
What do the nonconformist Soviet author Vladimir Voinovich, the blacklisted American author Howard Fast, and the Mexican leftist printmaking collective the Taller de Gráfica Popular have in common? They all engaged in cultural exchange that bridged between the “three worlds” of the middle to late twentieth century. In those years, cultural exchange between the developed capitalist world, the socialist world, and the regions of the developing world or global south was shaped and driven by opposed, yet interpenetrating, modes of aesthetic, political and economic evaluation. What was esteemed by art markets, publishers and museums in New York that promoted the banner of artistic autonomy was excoriated in Moscow cultural institutions oriented on Socialist Realism. Yet, often enough, leftist cultural figures of the developing world had greater appreciation for the avant-garde past of Soviet and European Socialist art than for the formally conservative aesthetics of “mature socialism.” This created the conditions for arbitrage: the movement of works of negligible or negative economic or political value in one setting to a location where their distinctive resonance brought in top dollar, ruble, political agency, or reputational gain, as the case may be. For agents and institutions balanced on the borders, such exchange offered special opportunities to make art and to generate political and economic value. In this lecture, examination of three case studies of cultural arbitrage makes possible a revision of influential theories of world cultural circulation and interaction (Moretti, Pascale, etc.) and new angles of vision on the cultural life of the singular globe in the era of three worlds.