DAN MIHALTIANU

Art of Exile

It is relatively recent that Art has abandoned the “aesthetic” principles as its main values and is orienting itself towards “social activism”. Not only in the shadow of politics as in the past from the French Revolution to the Soviet Revolution and on to the collapse of the Communist Block, Art identifies itself as “motor” of the society. Those ambitions become more evident in the moment when we are speaking about the “Death of Art”.
In this respect Exile is just one of the multiple aspects of the actual artistic discourse. This issue it is not necessarily approached only by artists in exile, it is a “capital” which can be fructified by any “art-preneur” with ambitions of immediate success.
Speaking about art and exile in terms of globalization is a difficult task. The “globalization of art” it is regarded as a “positive” phenomenon while the “globalization of society” has an increasingly “negative” connotation.
This conflict of interests seems to be just an apparent one: socially involved artists frequently use “anti-globalization” themes in the fight for the “globalization of art”. Facing this paradox, we don’t have to forget that “corporate art” applies to the same rules as the “corporate capitalism”: money, power and domination. The idea that art is the avant-garde of the society has already been proved by the fact that the macdonaldization of art was completed long before the macdonaldization of the society. Pop Art was the first celebration of this phenomenon, but it was only restricted to western art.
After the Wall, a “Big Mac Art” produced in Bucharest should taste the same like the ones produced in Tallinn, Berlin or New York, even it uses “local” ingredients and called “Le Big Mac Art” or “Das Big Mac Art”. And, this is not all; if macdonaldization is mainly connected with the “stomach”, disneylandization is taking care of the “soul”. But, what seems to be the most important, “glamour” is supplied by the hollywoodization. A “star art system” is born: “emerging star artists”, “starlet artists”, “shooting star artists”, “superstar artists”, “star curators”, “senior star curators” and “megastar art managers”.
If we just forget about the “drama of the exile” with its multitude of aspects; economic, political, cultural and existential ones and look only into the “art and exile” issue, a controversial aspect becomes evident: the globalization seems to make the exile non relevant. What it is left is just the “nostalgia of origins”. This does not exclude but reinforces the division of the contemporary art world and especially the European one in categories and zones of interest, fluctuating according to the geo-politics. It is an on going process of “rewriting” the art history similar to the one from the Orwell’s novel: Western Art, Eastern Art, Euro-Atlantic Art, Post Communist Art, Central European Art, Balkan Art, Baltic Art, Scandinavian Art, Post Soviet Art, EU Art, Emerging EU Art, New Europe Art and so on.