Dog Eat Dog: Who is in Charge of Controlling Art in The Post‐Socialist Condition?

Abstract

The article explores what happens when artists attempt to control art in order to ‘solve’ conflicting definitions of art in the post‐Socialist condition with the use of two case studies. In the case of Little Warsaw, a Hungarian artist duo, representatives of the ex‐unofficial and underground artists were eager to take over the disappearing state control and claim authoritarian power to define the boundaries of art and police fellow artists. In the second case radical Russian artists, such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener, Western artists and curators declared themselves the guardians of standards and norms in their desire to keep the status quo of Cold War art discourse alive and maintain their dominant position within it. The author refers back to the heritage of censorship employed by artists towards fellow artists and to the hidden history of gate‐keeping in modern art.