7/29/2019 Pessimism no more 7

1/1

this institution: Now, it is more future-oriented. A new political course, a renewal and

modernization of this public museum institution. The director announces that he is opening

the doors wide for new artistic styles and genres. He underlines the historical connection

between the past and the present, and how the initial department of the museum, founded in

1892, also started out with the gathering of works of the then-contemporary Bulgarian

artists.19

The National Art Gallery is showing real appetite for the idea of a future museum of

contemporary art as an offshoot of its own institutional body. The Gallery turns out to be a

true driving force for this process, as it organizes the first auction of contemporary art in

Bulgaria in order to create the initial collection of the future museum of contemporary art.

If the aim of this auction was to concentrate exclusively on the commercial side and the

development of an art market for contemporary art, this could count as a true achievement.

But I feel ill at ease thinking of a commercial auction as a positive starting point for a

discussion on a museum even if it takes the guise of a charitable event. As Minister Stefan

Danailov, namesake of the aforementioned Boris, declares in his speech: The accumulation

of the fund out of the sale of the works themselves is of groundbreaking importance for layingthe foundations of the new museum. 20 The most important thing, we are told, is to make the

first step. The rest will follow. Why are things once more lumped together, and the official

institutions find themselves again with strange political strategies neither fish, flesh nor

fowl? A question arises from the fund thus raised for this Future museum of contemporary

art what is the role of the state and public institutions, and what is the role of the free

market in a democratic society? Applying this recipe would result neither in a real art market

nor in a really public museum for contemporary art.

When you are in an isolated space, the local truths are privileged. Not one of the official art

museum institutions is proposing an approach with which to face the facts which remain

largely terra incognita to the Bulgarian institutions. In search of a model and discourse more

adequate to contemporary art processes, we might want to dwell on the arguments put forthby Ruxandra Balaci, a curator with great experience on the international scene and scientific

director of the recently formed National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, located

since 2004 in a wing of the monumental and infamous former House of the People, on the

life. What is happening in the public space is also happening here. Thus, the Gallery appears as an active partnerto the art of today. The National Art Gallery, byAntonia Vitanova.

19This is ignoring the fact that more or less around this time the first Bulgarian artists to really create works

make their appearance, creating something that in form and content can be recognized as fine arts. This processcomes monstrously late. On these territories, part of the Ottoman Empire, no worldly paintings or fine artsare produced or created. The iconography is that of canonic church painting, created by anonymous masters, isthe only widely accessible notion of this type of art until the beginning of the 19th century, when the concept ofthe author was imported to these territories from the West along with that of the nation-state. That is how the

first true artists and their great works appear on the scene, branded by the fact that they are truly the first in ahistory. The truth is that after the new modern Bulgarian state was constituted, the deficit in local artistic talentsled the forefathers to import Bulgarian national artists are imported from Slavic lands more advanced in theirdevelopment. The artists invited from the Slavic border regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or from Russiawere provided by the state authorities with studios, official positions, grants and other attractive offers to makethem stay and fulfill their grand mission to lay the foundations of a Bulgarian art scene. A story reminiscent ofthat of the new Bulgarian Czar, imported around the same time from the West, along with Brussels needle laceand other fashion attributes brought in to substantiate the glamour of bourgeois ideas of prestige.

20 You can get a direct impression of the speech of the Bulgarian Minister of Culture, Mr. Danailov, at the firstauction of contemporary art in Bulgaria on 19 December 2006, online at (in Bulgarian).