Essays

Art criticism in Romania in the Years 1980-2000
In Romania, as everywhere else in Eastern Europe over the past 25 years, when we take into consideration the number of art critics and their reach, we can but speak of a "small world". It was a very limited world, relatively closed in upon itself, yet it possessed a certain visibility and a symbolic scope which one would call "elitist" or "elite" today, if we were to examine it closely. However, during the Communist period, it was probably a "salvational elitism" because it set up a model of cultural intellectualism, representing a true "alternative", that opposed the official, omnipotent culture, perverted by ideological duplicity and totalitarian populism.
Read more...

Cosmopolis: a challenge
It has recently become fashionable to deplore the proliferation of international biennials of art that has occurred since the 1990s. A phenomenon, which has allowed many artists to enter the history of art for the first time not only due to their practising certain styles but also thanks to their belonging to different regions of the world, is seen as a levelling process brushing aside local specificities in favour of the tyranny of an international visual jargon.
Read more...

Is there a Future for the Spiritual in Art ?
Romanian Neo-Byzantinism: Modernism versus Postmodernism in Eastern Europe
This paper proposes to analyze the impact of a particular dominant of post-World War II Western culture and a certain feature of American academic discussions on certain intellectual and artistic circles in Eastern Europe. More to the point, by analysing a specific artistic case I will try to show how 'postmodern' ideas and a diffuse 'postmodernist' state of mind have shaped certain cultural directions in this European region, and especially in Romania, in the years right before and after the democratic upheavals of 1989. European region, and especially in Romania, in the years right before and after the democratic upheavals of 1989.
Read more...

Letter from Bucharest in Paris
I left my country seven years ago, and here I am, an exotic Romanian transplanted into a cultural soil reputed to be so fertile,so “promoting” for geniuses coming from that oh-so-Francophone, Francophile, uniquely-Latin people on the eastern frontiers of Europe.A people that still considers Paris its second, more “luminous”, capital… Maybe this was correct fifty or hundred years ago.For twenty or more years now,in spite of their half Latin half Balkan sensitivity, young Romanian poets and artists have preferred the longer roads to New York or London.
Read more...