I read Mikhail Piotrovsky's recent interview with the journal International Affairs, and here are some extracts
On the role of the East in the present-day cultural field:
«It is no accident that in the world that has now revived and is called the East, universal museums are being created, for example the famous Louvre Abu Dhabi, and now a museum is being created in Saudi Arabia. They are being created on the model of the Hermitage. When Catherine created the Hermitage and brought pictures to some godforsaken place at the back of beyond, there were the same moral objections in Europe as there are now over the Louvre Abu Dhabi: "why bring it to savages?" Universal museums embody the understanding that all cultures are part of a single whole, and that they are in a kind of dialogue.
All the newest technologies are there. When exhibitions of contemporary art are mounted now in the West, in America, look at whom they show: Chinese, Korean, Japanese artists; they have begun to show Arab ones, while their own are far fewer. This is reality: the world is diverse, and it must be built on the sovereignty of different cultures, which are all one.»
On attitudes to the Hermitage in the West:
«There they write that the Hermitage "launders" Russia's imperial history. We really do talk about emperors from morning till night. Some people have grown tired of this; they have their own point of view, and they consider that the main thing is to advance a socio-political agenda. We have recently mounted an exhibition of Frans Snyders. Had we done it in Amsterdam, given the present intellectual situation in the West, we should have been obliged to say that all this wealth of Flanders, with its art of still lifes, covers up the terrible exploitation of unfortunate people in the colonies. There would have been a protest, because some black people would have had to be inserted without fail. We should have been obliged to say that the Great Geographical Discoveries were also the beginning of colonialism, forgetting that the very word colonialism was coined in Europe. I think there would have been protests over the drawings of Peter's time on parchment (and this is the skin of an unborn calf, very thin). There would have been protests from ecologists.
This world has somewhat reorganised itself, and in this world such a story of Russia as ours (and all our exhibitions are a story of Russia and its place in the world) no longer quite fits the agenda that is beginning to form in society.»
