Page 91 - The MoMA/ Guggenheim issue of World of Art magazine (2003)

emerges from the sometimes cynical, sometimes
humorous, sometimes tragic mixtures of all

kinds of local artifacts and national symbols
with sophisticated Western visual technologies
is mainly an extraordinary vitality and creativity.
colorful, overwhelming, full of sarcastic sincerity

about human nature and history, this vital
creativity assumes and features courageously an
enormous esthetic and existential kitsch.
it is difficult to say whether this kitsch, “crude”

and also pathetic as it is, pertains more to the
artists than to the curators. anyway, it speaks
convincingly about “a virtual encounter with the
future” of the Western world, as the curators put

it, insofar by the actual peripheralizing of the West
brought about by the global mixing of cultures
and the superposition of contradictory visual
traditions “there is nothing in store for europe

and the West but the Balkans”. in this respect, by
its hybrid, “impure” nature, modeled by various
conflicting cultural and spiritual traditions, the
soft and democratic concept of visual Balkanism,

rather than the dangerous political concept of
Balkanism, might become an interesting aesthetic
methodology, well adapted to the “less-stable”
cultural syntheses and the “diasporic” reality of

the present-day planetary destabilized melting-
pot. in a world where stable, monolithic cultures
tend to become exceptions, between the scyla
of monotonous globalization and the carybda

of local cultural sufficiency, visual (and spiritual)
Balkanism might represent a possible model for
fruitful reflections.

MiHAi OROVEAnU
PhoTo By anonyMos
froM his collecTion
courTesy of The arTisT

WORLD of ART 89