Thread by @AWerberger

Art in times of Russian #disinformation or how contemporary Russian art serves not truth but paralysis and demobilisation.

A few thoughts on the occasion of a concert by Sergei #Shnurov #шнур yesterday in Moscow.

#Ukraine🇺🇦

@TimothyDSnyder wrote convincingly last week: "Although Russia is fascist at the top, it is not fascist through and through. A specific emptiness lies at the center of Putin’s regime. It is the emptiness in the eyes of Russ. officials in photographs...

as they look into a vacant middle distance, a habit they believe projects masculine imperturbability. Putin’s regime functions not by mobilizing society with the help of a single grand vision, as fascist Germany and Italy did..

but by demobilizing individuals, assuring them that there are no certainties and no institutions that can be trusted."

So: Demobilisation means asking people to do nothing, to remain lethargic and without empathy.

This kind of inaction is also contributed to by parts of Russian art, staging quasi-resistance to prevent real resistance and stop people from paying attention. This art says in a closed space: Look, you can say anything, but it prevents people from observing and acting.

Yesterday, after a day of unacknowledged Russian defeats, S. Shnur sang an old song in Moscow in which someone dreams that Moscow is burning down. In the lyrics everything opposition & government is burning down, including Pussy Riot.. You would think, hey, what a taboo break.

Everyone is excited or angry in social media. But what is actually happening? Muscovites are dancing happily to this song in peaceful Moscow, while Mariupol and many other cities in Ukraine have actually been completely wiped out. Not a single courageous word about this..

Snur does it like a worn-out, jaded old avant-gardist. Shouting out taboos loudly, breaking supposed boundaries, but actually serving the regime and actually agreeing with the war. Breaking taboos as an empty gesture.

Once again it has been shown "how avant-garde art is made in Moscow." But actually, people are prevented from thinking. In Moscow, people sing about dying. In Ukraine, people are dying.

This is Russian demobilising art, this is Russian arrière-garde art.

Hier noch der Text für die Interessierten. Ich übersetzte diese Pseudo-Avantgarde heute nicht.

One last thing: If I you let burn Pussy Riot & Putin together for the sake of an alliteration/rhyme then that is disinformation art. Snyder: "sadistic tradition of interrogators: nothing is true, nothing is worthy of sacrifice, everything is a joke, everyone is for sale".