We have opened what I think is a wonderful exhibition of Frans Snyders and Flemish still lifes. One of the journalists said that it is unusual for the Hermitage. Nothing of the sort – it is just what an exhibition in a palace should be: sumptuous, theatrical. The Hermitage is art in palatial interiors.
This exhibition has many meanings. A splendid collection that is testimony, among other things, to our self-sufficiency. In Russia, using material from Russia and the experience of Russian museums, a super exhibition of Flemish still lifes has been created. And Snyders celebrated Stalls have even remained in their usual place. The permanent display is functioning together with the exhibition. That’s also a Hermitage tradition.
Besides its self-sufficiency, the still life exhibition has lots of philosophical meanings. The still life is on the one hand an illusion, as are trompe-l’oeils. On the other hand, it is a memento mori, a reminder of death: all this will pass. The still life is the joie de vivre. All of this is united by the Baroque – a lush, powerful style in which everything is exaggerated. The Flemish still life is a variant of the Baroque.
One more important aspect of the Baroque is that it is a very international style. It is no coincidence that it was taken up in different countries, including Russia.
That is connected with a topic that we are now beginning to actively discuss – the specificity of cultures, the interrelationship of the international and the national within them., National art is original, yet it is a part of world art. Otherwise it is impossible to defend. Russian culture cannot be cancelled because it is a part of world culture.
The museum conducts a dialogue of cultures that is capable of resolving the issue of the interrelationship of one’s own culture and world culture. If dialogue is absent, then culture wars arise. Now they are going on all over the world.
Last week Intermuseum – our beloved museum festival – took place in Moscow. The meetings were held in the new building of the Tretyakov Gallery. An experiment that is raising many questions in Moscow is the depiction of paintings on the façade of the building. For Saint Petersburg there is nothing unusual in that. The Hermitage and the Russian Museum have put paintings on billboards, on their façades. In the General Staff building, pictures are reproduced on the windows. Our city has the Benois House, which also has paintings on it, They look good. People do like Petersburg knowhow.
Intermuseum began with a major discussion on the theme of “People and the Museum”. It was about who works in a museum and what kind of people come there. There are many topics. One of them is connected with how viewers perceive the museum, what our attitude to visitors should be. They come to obtain pleasure. We do everything for them, but we do remind people that the main thing in a museum is not the visitor, but the preservation of the artefacts.
With the aid of artificial intelligence – computer programs that process a huge volume of data, we study not just complaints but also the tastes of people who come to the museum. There are two routes you can go down after getting that material. Worst of all, having studied visitors’ tastes, is to conform to their wishes. That’s how it is with films on YouTube – you only have to watch one and you will constantly be suggested others like it. If you lie on the couch without objecting and keep watching one and the same thing, then you’ll become more primitive. There is another route. We want museum visitors to understand and take in what we want to tell them: ideas, meanings… Having studied people’s tastes, we can start to manipulate them. Which is not good either.
There is the concept of designing impressions: the process of creating positive emotions in a person. That is something we can engage in – planning what impressions visitors will get from a trip to the museum, whether they will go away satisfied. We need to arrange things so that they get impressions that combine their personal expectations with public benefit and the mission of the museum. That combination accords with the interests of the individual and society.
We are living in a situation where culture has become the main thing. Today people are talking more about traditional values and historical memory than about politics and economics. There is a problem here: everyone’s traditional values are different, as is historical memory. Each people has its own. Suddenly the idea of banning the niqab arose. We can discuss it as much as we like, but we need to understand that concealing a woman’s face to prevent strangers from seeing it is a traditional value in various cultures. What can you do about that?
We share traditional values with the greater part of the world. Presently we are engaged in active contact with China. Chinese civilization uses logographic characters and not individual letters as we do. That’s a big difference.
The prophecy that the 21st century will become an age of the humanities is coming true. The aim of those branches of learning is to teach people to understand themselves and others, to get to know different cultures and the course of history. People are increasingly coming to understand how they should regard traditions, the historical past, the monuments that preserve the past.
If you destroy monuments then after three generations people will have forgotten their history and civilization.
In this regard our legislation is among the best in the world. There is a law that rigidly and strictly imposes the protection of cultural monuments. It obliges builders to have an expert assessment made before starting work to prevent archaeological sites being affected. There are endless arguments and court cases on those grounds. Some people reckon the law is not good enough, others that it is excessively strict. Political entities are fond of using the topic in their battles.
The President of Russia has said that there is a need to eliminate the complexities in the legislation that hinder sites from being saved. Sometimes bureaucratic obstacles arise that lead to a site being lost before it is saved. Then a construction lobby suddenly emerged that put forward the proposal to eliminate the complexities that hinder builders from working. They came up with changes to the law that would exclude archaeological reconnaissance, the obligation to establish whether or not there is some object underground on the site before building. It is good that this is all being discussed. In recent days the State Duma held parliamentary hearings about an amendment to the law on the preservation of cultural heritage.
While speaking at the hearings, I had to remind people what the President had been saying. He stated that there was a need to eliminate everything that hinders sites from being saved and not what hinders those sites from being destroyed. Let’s look for a compromise.
It’s not that on the one hand the industrial-building complex is standing up for its interests, while on the other some restorers, some “cultured young ladies”, are attempting to save something for no clear reason. The cultural heritage industry is also a powerful economic and political force. A force upon which our right to a future existence depends.
Compromise is possible. There needs to be agreement on how to do away with the superfluous bureaucratic stages, but keep the law functioning. The country is huge. There are an enormous number of archaeological sites under the ground that have not yet been found. We need to look for them, to study them, preserve them and leave them for future generations. That course is bound up with our self-affirmation.
Concern about historical sites is concern about cultural sovereignty. Our sites, and also our legislation in this field, are a contribution to world culture.
This material was published in the Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti newspaper, №96 (7672) on 29 May 2024 with the headline “Concern about Cultural Sovereignty”.
