Art as Pawn in Russian Power Game

I'm not informed enough on contemporary Russian society to know what to make of the trial of two Russian curators found guilty of inciting hatred for showing mildly provocative artworks (like the one at right by Alexander Kosolapov).

On one hand, it felt as if the ultra-nationalists who filed the complaint that led to the trial must be kidding...this image is a serious threat to the Russian Orthodox Church, "the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world and second only to the Roman Catholic Church among Christian churches, numbering over 135 million members world wide"?

On the other hand, the impact of this on the fledgling contemporary art scene in Russia, which has been making impressive strides over that past 10 years, seemed unfortunate. As the New York Times noted when the judge handed down only a fine for curators Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev (rather than the anticipated jail sentence), "Andrei Yerofeyev and some of his supporters said they believed that the Kremlin had intervened to prevent a prison sentence that could tarnish Russia’s image abroad."

Too late for that, I'd say. The trial was ridiculous, and what's worse, as Samodurov noted, “Now any exhibition on religion showing works that are not straightforwardly religious can be deemed criminal."

With all the oligarchs delving into the international contemporary art scene these days, I wouldn't be surprised that the Kremlin is image conscious on this front, but the Kremlin is also the body that can modernize Russia's free speech laws, so their assumed intervention is obviously the least they could do. Of course, they'll argue that the difficult job of cooling down religious tension in Russia requires some flexibility in the free speech department, but by all accounts this exhibition was hardly gonna lead to blood in the streets on its own...it would require some serious manipulation to help it do that.

Which brings me back to what I noted up top, that I'm not informed enough to really know how to interpret the trial. So I turned to Matthew Bown over at IZO, a great source of all things Russian art related in English. Here is his take:

I think this trial was only nominally about art and chiefly about power. The artists themselves were not charged. The owners of private galleries that showed some of these works were not charged. The reason being that they are not figures in the post-Soviet apparat, just private entrepreneurs. Samodurov, as head of the Sakharov Centre, and Erofeev, as head of the New Art department at the Tretyaklov Gallery, were figures in the apparat. The aim of the lengthy prosecution, which has been accomplished, was to expel these bearers of an alternative ideology from the corridors of power.

That would seem to explain it quite well.