Authentic Creative Work? No Longer in Demand
by Vytautas
Rubavičius
In the environment
of Lithuanian culture a person, being called an artist, feels somewhat
uncomfortable. On the one hand, this word seems to be a normal description
of someone doing a certain work and (sometimes) living off it, similar
to a banker, doorkeeper etc. At the same time, an artists occupation
still evokes some kind of mythology that not so long ago used to distinguish
an artist among others, and rendered a unique incomparable meaning to
art and creative work. The meeting of these semantic layers in the word
artist makes the person called by this word unconsciously
create an ironic distance between himself/herself and an artists
status.
The rapid changes that took place in art and its reflection can be related
with the assimilation of post-modern artistic practices and attitudes
while building a new social formation, as the positive values and stereotypes
of the market and consumerist ideology were taking root. It is particularly
distinct in the field of the so-called visual arts, as these arts are
the most liable to be used for the needs of contemporary culture of
images and spectacles, let alone the arts that proliferate on the basis
of the new communication technologies. The purposefulness of these changes
is described by the basic imperative of contemporary Lithuanian culture
to reach the European or even world market. An artist
can believe in the authenticity of his/her work, but he/she realizes
quite well that in the market conditions no artistic authenticity
can equal, lets say, the widely advertised artifact of a
maniacs horrific subconsciousness. Authenticity
can be thrown into the market and become in demand only after it has
been turned into a certain brand and deprived of all metaphysical associations
with being or existence.