Editorial

Dear Readers!

For the eighth time we are celebrating the New Year together and with congratulations and wishes of success, good luck, peace and prosperity, we present a new issue of the journal as a gift. It turned out to be very extensive in terms of the variety of topics and time of coverage of the artistic culture of Eurasia.

The issue opens with the “Eurasian Heritage” section. Its main theme, Mongolian temple architecture, is represented by various monuments, but is considered not only in the historical and art critical aspects, but also in terms of the semantic interpretation of temples. This architecture is an outstanding heritage of mankind, and its study, we hope, will help to understand the highest aesthetic tasks that architects set for themselves in past centuries, when the ideas of spirituality and beauty were combined with logic and a deeply thought-out system of proportioning.

The issue of the journal is dedicated to the  art of the USSR period, and it is no coincidence, since this year the 100th anniversary of the USSR was celebrated. The “Forum” section is about it this. Together with our authors, we looked into the recent past, remembered the names of many artists. At the same time, very interesting topics for future research were identified. For example, as you know, the art of this period is, in fact, works of one style, socialist realism. Art critics and artists, of course, are aware of the heated discussions about evaluation of this style. There were even radical statements that, fortunately for art, it had outlived its usefulness, and finally the time for creative freedom had come. But now is the time for reassessments, and it turned out that this style is not at all like the stereotyped definitions that some hotheads gave it. Were its forms in Russia, Georgia, the Baltic states the same? Didn't the discovery and development of many new lines of modern art took place within its borders? Here, for example, is the textbook picture of A.M. Gerasimov “I.V. Stalin and K.E. Voroshilov for a walk in the Kremlin”, seems to be a standard of a cult of personality and socialist realism. But how many artists are now capable of such powerful picturesqueness? And the works of A. Plastov and A. Deineka — isn't this social realism? And when and, most importantly, where did this style end? In a single city or in the minds of individual art historians? The latter seems to be truer. And how, then, to explain the appearance and sometimes dominance at exhibitions of works that are already attributed to the  emerging style of “new classics — new realism” — is this not a clear transformation of socialist realism? Moreover, this style has become international, and judging even by those articles by art historians from China that we publish in this section, it is difficult to see signs of the extinction of this style. On the contrary, it is being developed and enriched at the expense of national artistic traditions.

The legacy of the Soviet period is enormous and very valuable. The best works are included in the collections and permanent exhibitions of the central museums of Russia and other countries. And here I would like to fix one very important point. The rise of the art of that time was, among other things, connected with the active position of the state. At the same time, there was, sometimes justly criticized, the practice of supporting the creativity of artists through the so-called social order. The author was obliged, according to the  contract, to perform and present certain works at the exhibition. This gave rise to talk about the dictatorship of party organs, about nepotism among the leaders of creative unions in the distribution of orders. Of course, this often happened. But doesn't nepotism exist in politics and business today? And, most importantly, something else is also known: the vast majority of artists, fulfilling an order, have always created much more works, and this led to new discoveries in art.

This issue successfully combined two articles under the heading “Philosophy and Theory of Art”. Polystylism and an abundance of art criticism concepts create a complex picture of the theory of art in the current conditions. Conceptual search, of course, must go; new theoretical approaches to understanding art have arisen before and will appear in the future. We, for our part, believe that the criteria for the value of the work of both artists and art theorists are professionalism, humanism and recognition of the core of higher values as a spiritual guide for every person and, of course, for a creative person.

V.S. Solovyov, one of the pillars of Russian philosophy, has a wonderful work “The General Meaning of Art”. In it, he writes: “Natural beauty has already clothed the world with its radiant veil, ugly chaos is powerlessly moving under the harmonious image of the cosmos and cannot throw it off either in the boundless expanse of celestial bodies, or in the close circle of earthly organisms. Shouldn't our art be concerned only with cloaking only human relationships in beauty, embodying in tangible images the true meaning of human life?.. A man with his rational consciousness should be not only the goal of the natural process, but also a means for a reverse, deeper and more complete impact on nature from the side of the ideal principle”.