{"id":400024,"date":"2001-03-11T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-03-11T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400024"},"modified":"2001-03-11T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-03-11T23:00:00","slug":"lesz-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/kritika\/lesz-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Fart On Art?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I asked everybody, I even turned to specialists, but no one could tell me when the art fair recently renamed as Art Budapest was going\r\nto be opened. I found it rather foreboding that even those who were directly interested in this event, which used to be high-ranking, were\r\nindifferent. Finally the editor of one of the special journals interested in the event informed me about where and when it would take place.\r\nAccidentally it was actually this editor who helped me to get in, because I did not have an invitation card, and the cash desk closed an hour\r\nbefore the opening ceremony. Six finely built heroes guarded the entrance against all those arty people to make sure that no disturbance\r\nwas created around the tables laid in the hall with plates full of biscuits.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

So when I started to lose all my hopes, this editor came carrying the copies of his journals, and luckily he happened to have an extra\r\ncomplimentary ticket with which I managed to sneak in through the gate. Inside the hall there were very few organisers, gallery directors,\r\nexhibitors and \u201dexternal\u201d visitors like myself hanging around, and I definitely did not see more than two critics. I was astonished, nearly\r\nshocked, as I had good memories from the beginning of the 90’s when this hall was full of life. But this time the number of people in the\r\nwhole, together with the protagonists of the jewellery exhibition opened at the same time, was about the same as the number of players\r\nand supporters altogether at a fourth-class football match. All in all, there was this utterly empty yawning hall, with only a few high quality\r\nstands, high-ranking artists and art service providers, and of course with tremendous indifference and heaps of very average junk. Only\r\nthose artists were present who had the possibility to exhibit their works under the aegis of their galleries or – in a few cases – at their own\r\ncost. A private exhibitor from Slovenia was also there, very probably only because he had got lost. He will definitely be cleverer next time\r\nand not go the wrong way.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The people who gathered around the speaker listening to the opening speech obviously did not live in the same world. On the right\r\nthere were members of the scruffy artists’ society, while on the left there were the well-dressed representatives of the jeweller aristocracy\r\nsurrounded with a cloud of perfume. The manager of one of the well-equipped stands – Van Gogh, Schiele – even made a remark: one of\r\nthem might venture to look around in this part of the hall and buy something. It was difficult to imagine that it could happen the other way\r\nround.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The publishers and journals were represented by \u00daj M\u0171v\u00e9szet [New Art], Gy\u0171jt\u0151k & Gy\u0171jtem\u00e9nyek [Collectors & Collections] and M\u0171\u00e9rt\u0151\r\n[Connoisseur], but even they made a much less spectacular appearance than earlier, when the event was still called Art Expo and when it\r\nwas organised by specialists and art historians, such as L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Beke and Krisztina Jerger, and even prominent foreign personalities were\r\nmembers of the jury and the art council or accompanied the sponsors (e.g.: Johan van Dam, Bryan Montgomery). Only two or three of the\r\ngalleries dared to challenge the public taste, the average and the trash, undertaking the risk of promoting contemporary modern art at all\r\ntimes and all places (they were represented by Ilona Lovas, P\u00e9ter T\u00fcrk, G\u00e1bor Rosk\u00f3, etc.). I sadly thought about the times when among\r\nothers \u00c9ri Gallery, Liget Gallery V\u00e1rfok 14 Gallery appeared here as well as the Erd\u00e9sz-Meinschikoff Gallery, which exhibited works by the\r\ngreatest artists of the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century. And then I have not mentioned the individually exhibiting artists.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

It is obvious that an event organised in such a mediocre way does not make much sense, it is in vain, because nobody is satisfied at\r\nthe end: neither the organisers, nor the exhibiting companies, nor the artists. The organisers are not satisfied, because an exhibition like\r\nthis does not attract publicity, which is not too potent anyway, but even repels them, the galleries because they wasted a lot of money\r\nwhich may never be returned, and the artists because they also come out badly both financially and morally. Some kind of an intermediate\r\nsolution is needed so that both the artistic world and Hungexpo finds their mutual interest. However, this time even the structure of\r\norganisers was obscure, and on the homepage of the Fair it was not possible to click on the event called Art Exhibition. The advertising of\r\nthe event used to be much better: whole page colour advertisements in the special journals and in other places. Now there was a hardly\r\nnoticeable three-line announcement on the edge of one of the pages in Pesti Est saying: Beauty – Sparkle – Art. Well, there was plenty of\r\nsparkling, but you could only find art with a magnifying glass.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Now we should only wish for what they said to be not true. Namely that this was the status of contemporary Hungarian art in a\r\nnutshell.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I asked everybody, I even turned to specialists, but no one could tell me when the art fair recently renamed as Art Budapest was going to be opened. I found it rather foreboding that even those who were directly interested in this event, which used to be high-ranking, were indifferent. Finally the editor of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630024,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kritika"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}