"From which artists can I commission my portrait, and not a stone in a glass cube?"

Siarhei Hrynievich. Fragment of a painting exhibited at the Belarusian exhibition of the Venice Biennale. According to a photo from Siarhei Hrynievich's Facebook page

I understand when it comes to professions related to words: writers, poets, singers in emigration have lost access to their audience, and cannot write in other languages; journalists and publicists — all, effectively, extremists; scientists try to integrate into European science, but again there's the language barrier, the irrelevance of their research areas for European science, detachment from their subject of study, libraries, museums, archives; even my colleagues, architects and restorers (unexpectedly!), without excellent knowledge of the local language, local legislation, regulations, construction practices, and without the ability to independently manage construction, lose opportunities for work; et cetera.

But plastic arts have a universal language, at least within European civilization, which covers a good half of the world. If your works were sought after in Belarus and allowed you to live solely from art there, then you should find the same, if not greater, appreciation here, in European emigration. If not, then perhaps it's worth considering whether you are engaged in "self-expression" that drags your life to the social bottom, but is actually needed by no one? Again, what kind of help are we talking about? Is this palliative care for creators who cannot admit to themselves that they are doing nonsense? Then it more closely resembles a pathological addiction like gambling, when a person continues to believe that any moment now — they will win back their losses. Are we collecting money to help gamblers in emigration? It seems not.

What kind of help is required for Belarusian artists in the sixth year after 2020 and the fourth year after 2022? To rent a new rehab villa where they will do nothing? To pay off their debts incurred due to their own unsuitability for life? For paints, palette knives, plasticine, paper and canvases, help in renting studios — that's not regrettable at all if it allows someone to start from scratch. But the timeline suggests that the help is really palliative.

Again and again, I will return to the thesis that money is the lifeblood of art. "Art for art's sake," which explained the aesthetic value of art even without internal meaning or didactic tasks, and the disdain for bourgeois tastes in the postmodern era, degenerated into the immortal hydra of "everyone owes us simply because we do something, and what we do is none of your business, you haven't grown up enough for that." The cycle of this parasitism is quite closed: some create junk, art critics of art junk convey the incredible importance of this art act to society using convoluted vocabulary, society feels ashamed of its backwardness, thereby creating fertile ground for new creators of junk and its art critics. The scheme is so successful that a banana taped with scotch tape can be sold for a pile of cash — sometimes that very nouveau riche sucker is found on whom all this depends. It resembles cigarette smuggling — it doesn't matter how much is confiscated, the batches that get through will more than cover all previous failures.

But this logic of "getting" society has driven art into a dead end. The avant-garde broke with old art; returning to realistic painting or the ordered system is today considered one of the most terrible sins in visual arts and architecture. One must create new art: abstract painting, abstract sculpture, deconstructivism, glass-concrete-metal, ready-made, art installations, performances — this is fresh, this is new!

Malevich's abstract "Black Square" was created in 1915, Duchamp's "Fountain" in 1917, Mies van der Rohe's German pavilion in 1929. Your contemporary art is as contemporary and relevant as a cup with monograms from the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov (1913).

In a hundred years, Baroque, Rococo, Classicism, Romanticism, and Realism had time to change. But a hundred years after the avant-garde, we are again shown a urinal with a name that does not correspond to its content. This is fresh, this is new! No, this is, if not decline, then prolonged stagnation.

Entire art forms that required talent, skill, and craftsmanship have died out. What remains are those where success is measured by audacity.

But people continue to perceive old art, emotionally experiencing no less passion before an 18th-century painting than by becoming part of a daring modern performance. And no one can provide this old art — for contemporary artists, it's a decadent cringe — to paint a realistic portrait, a battle scene, or, God forbid, a bouquet of flowers.

In their place come people like Nikas Safronov, who is bad not because he paints realistic portraits, but because he does it absolutely tastelessly.

These are two extremes: on one side — a hundred-year-old stale avant-garde and various art junk, largely useless to us, the middle class, neither in our modest apartments nor in museum galleries; on the other side — tastelessness, to which the nouveau riche, who have risen to the top from our middle class, are prone. And between them, almost nothing.

We are, of course, to blame here: this is the price for social equality. We hanged princes, shot tsars, expelled bishops from palaces, and those kings who survived are forced to lead a showy democratic life. There are no patrons for great art, no example for new manufacturers.

The problem is most evident when turning to contemporary popular arts: music, cinema, and video games. Yes, a prank like John Cage's 4′33″, where a musical piece contains no sound at all, sometimes it makes it into textbooks and mass culture, but that's it. Yes, there are universally recognized masterpieces, there is popular tastelessness, there are interesting niche things, but no one will listen for six hours to a nail scratching glass, or watch a movie without heroes and plot. Such things will simply disappear or be mentioned in one sentence in a blogger's list of gags on YouTube.

And no one will be able to convince you that you don't understand something in art, because it will be obvious to you that what you see is the work of freaks. But for some reason, with plastic arts, this stops working — for some reason, the viewer is the "idiot" who doesn't understand art, and not the author who created garbage.

At first, I didn't pay attention to the Belarusian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but after the informational pressure became too great, I familiarized myself with it and even contributed to spreading information about it. The pavilion is, of course, not innovative, "simple, but with taste," I would say. But what made me think was the almost complete absence of other art forms in this pavilion, apart from deeply symbolic installations. There is almost no painting, no graphics, no sculpture, no painted chests.

Okay, the first time we introduce the public to Belarusian tragedy, but it became very interesting: is there a vision for a new pavilion? What will be there? Will we repeatedly let curious Europeans put their fingers into the bloody wound on our ribs, or will we break beyond the tragic into some other cosmos?

It seems to me that the Belarusian emigration should have its own art "biennale" where it could show and prove that "Belarusian artists in emigration" are worth something, and not just unfortunates on the civil society's temporary care. No matter how much our media writes about Belarusian artists, in truth, I still don't know which artists in emigration I can commission my portrait from, and not a stone in a glass cube with "a LoT oF MeAnInGs." Exhibitions are needed so that we know the market and names, because money is the lifeblood of art. The only help you can offer an artist in emigration is to buy their work (or not buy it).

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