Pain spots and sweet dreams of modern Belarusian art criticism.
Long gone are the days when art critics were at least somewhat favoured. Literature is called a “niche product”, Belarusian literary criticism has been accused of being absent for several decades, stating the death of not only the author but also the critic. Theatre has ceased to be a must and Belarusian cinema – does it exist in principle? Fine art from Belarus boldly walks through exhibition spaces far outside the country’s borders, but traditionally it is overlooked at home. Specialized magazines are eliminating each other, online platforms are disappearing, and keeping a critic as a staff member in the media is becoming a superfluous luxury. If culture is seen as a superfluous matter, then the professions of people called to evaluate this very culture remain outside the flow of the river of survival. At the same time, in order to maintain a high level of creativity, analytical generalization of processes, and fixing the facts of the present for the needs of the future, the work of critics is still important.
Is it possible to change the situation of almost complete oblivion? Can you stay in the profession and, contrary to the trends of fast consumption, aim for depth and thoroughness? What can be done today so that for all art critics there will be, if not immediately a bright day after tomorrow, then a slightly more optimistic tomorrow? This is what the members of the Analytical Group of the Belarusian Council for Culture discussed at the round table.
Unfortunately, we are unable to make the full text publicly available, so here are only excerpts from this conversation. The working issues of organizing the group’s activities will remain out of consideration. For security reasons, we are not naming the authors of analytical texts about cinema, music, literature, visual arts, traditional culture, and theatre.
In this text, together with our esteemed authors, we will focus on 3 important sections: the analysis of the current position of art criticism in the Belarusian media field, the distinctive features of the work of each of the critics, and the outline of requests for the future, which can suggest the vectors of further development of the direction.
Contents
Section 1. “Today’s art critic is a secret observer, a confidant, and a telepath.” A little about the current state of affairs
Section 2. “Evaluating the performance techniques of those who dance on a minefield is ungrateful and sometimes simply inappropriate.”
Section 3 “We have to do our job, maintain the current level and wait for better times”
Section 1. “Today’s art critic is a secret observer, a confidant, and a telepath.” A little about the current state of affairs
Music
The situation with music is seen as the easiest in terms of accessibility to the products of creativity. The releases appear in the public domain, and videos from concerts are published. There are also media that consistently write about Belarusian music. For example Klik (Belarusian: “Клік”), Podpolny Vestnik (Russian: “Подпольный вестник”), Piaršak (Belarusian: “Пяршак”), Budźma (Belarusian: “Будзьма”), by375. It is not necessary to neglect state sources either: the website of the Ministry of Culture of Belarus is a portal to another world, but it is also a reflection of a considerable part of Belarusian culture. The media, however, do not cover everything, and most write exclusively about releases. Therefore, if it is not only about products but also about processes, you should turn to alternative sources.
Information can often be obtained only from personal pages of artists in social networks and Telegram chats. Sometimes the comments below the posts reflect the real situation much better than the posts themselves. Here are some examples of what you can learn from such sources and what the media won’t cover:
- who was given and who was not given a tour certificate;
- a link to registration for a private “kvaternik” (so-called apartment concert);
- joint photo with another artist in the studio long before the release.
Only the most involved and even close ones know the state of affairs. Certain information, especially about the events inside Belarus, is not shared even among the circle of subscribers. If you can’t ask artists, organizers, and club owners a question personally, there is a good chance you won’t see the whole picture. An art critic today is a secret observer, a confidant, and a telepath.
Literature
The year 2020 overturned all processes in Belarusian society, greatly changing the circumstances, and displacing the previous orders, agreements, and compromises. And, as a result, the entire configuration of national culture changed. Which, as we remember, according to one of the popular versions, is just an analogy of reality. This is why agreeing to do literary process reviews at such a time was a win-win decision – at least for my own professional development and expert self-discipline in a time of chaos. Instead of wailing into the void and succumbing to apocalyptic sentiments, I had to collect and analyze facts, talk to colleagues, travel, read and browse, and even spy a little. Then I was able to draw conclusions and generalizations and come up with metaphors and epithets for various phenomena.
We see at least two trends in the analytics space. The first is global: the further it is, the more noticeably culture on a planetary scale is controlled by the expert field. Literature is strongly connected to the publishing market. This causes dissatisfaction among debut authors and representatives of certain marginal groups whose experiences and literary practices do not fit into the mainstream. As a result, readers who have access only to the offers of publishing houses suffer, buy world bestsellers, ignoring the creativity of their countrymen, and are uninformed about new books close to their views and tastes. The second trend is our regional one: there is an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty due to the war of 2022, and the strengthening of repression in Belarus and Russia. Against this background, trust in all-powerful black magicians, fortune tellers of all genders, and information charlatans – in a word, the collective Grigori Rasputin of our time is growing. Any attempt to analyze the situation by turning on the ratio and turning off the emotions will be defeated in this battle of psychics. Being an expert today is a red flag, and you have to live with it.
Fine art
Today, the information trend is more focused on promotion and advertising than criticism and in-depth analysis, and even more so in a narrow regional context, where, in fact, there has been no institution of criticism for a long time, but restrictions, censorship, and propaganda prevail. But maybe, precisely for the Belarusian context, during the collapse of ties and the destruction of independent information resources, a generalization platform would be a convenient tool? The question remains open: How can we encourage the cooperation of real professionals? After all, most of them follow an individual path and join already existing international platforms that have more experience, economic resources, and publicity.
Of course, we have some positive experiences, but it cannot be recognized as perfect either. Here we will mention the projects that tried, and some continue to work with critical and analytical materials about Belarusian art: Kalektar, Reform.news, Chrysalis Mag, Om-Open Muzej podcast, Statusprojekt, pARTisan, ArtAktivist, BLOK magazine, Budźma (Belarusian: “Будзьма”), cult.by, New Europe (Belarusian: Новая Еўропа), Art (Belarusian: Мастацтва), and others. You can also list those with which Belarusian authors cooperated: Szum, Most (Belarusian: Мост), Dwutygodnik, Springerin, Platforma.art, Art Forum, ХЖ and others. You can name as many as three dozen names of active art critics. Attempts to obtain funds for the organization of a full-fledged resource, even at least in the field of visual arts, have not yet been successful. And doing such a great job being based only on enthusiasm, as the example of Kalektar shows, is also not easy.
Cinema
The main problem of Belarusian film criticism remains the same – a small number of information sources. There are rather few new films. The vast majority of them are short, amateur level, and it is difficult to compare them with professional works from other countries.
Unlike other forms of art, Belarusian cinema did not have time to develop into a full-fledged process before the events of 2020. Our cinematography and cinematographers exist as separate creators and their projects. The emigration of many of the most active and talented creators and specialists after the events of 2020 made the situation even worse in this sense. Belarusian viewers and, accordingly, readers are detached from cinema created by Belarusians. In Belarus itself, at the moment, there are almost no public showings of Belarusian films that were not filmed at the behest of the regime. A few online shows (for example, the VODBLISK platform, the national programme of the Northern Lights festival (Belarusian: «Паўночнае ззянне») do not make a big impact on the domestic audience.
On the other hand, it is generally difficult to apply artistic criteria to the modern production of the Belarusfilm film studio. Moreover, this applies not only to feature films but, unfortunately, more and more often to documentaries and animated films. Film criticism as a phenomenon left the state media after the events of 2020 – propaganda does not require high-quality analytics.
Film criticism in Belarus is now possible only for independent resources, partly anonymously.
At the same time, there is a demand for modern national cinema. And this demand is not small. It has increased significantly since the events of 2020 amid growing interest in national culture. A question in the forms of exit to the viewer/reader. The general global trend towards the deprofessionalization of film criticism is, unfortunately, also relevant for Belarus – critics, as a rule, earn their living with something else, usually journalism. At the moment, Belarusian film criticism feels best in the form of personal blogs and Telegram channels. Which helps the contact with the audience, but, unfortunately, does not contribute to the professional level.
The main disease of modern journalism – copywriting – has not escaped Belarusian film criticism either. The number of original materials, and not reposts from social networks, is still small. The authors clearly lack knowledge of the history of cinema, including Belarusian.
Theatre
Belarusian theatre criticism was in a permanent crisis even in peacetime. Critics could always be counted on the fingers. There were almost no specialized publications – the theatre section was only in the newspaper Culture (Belarusian: “Культура”) and the magazine Art (Belarusian: “Мастацтва”). It was impossible to make a living writing reviews. There were two options: science or theatre journalism. However the financing of the first was constantly deteriorating, and the second was not in great demand by the media. After 2020, this not most favourable situation worsened dramatically. Some critics emigrated. Independent publishers closed or moved abroad and received the status of “extremist”. The latter made it almost impossible to publish texts from Belarus (for those who left, it is not possible to do it physically; for those who stayed, it is dangerous to do so). The most important thing is that the domestic theatre itself was hit hard: dismissals, bans on performances, censorship…
This had a significant impact on theatre criticism within the country. If we take into account the always positive reviews of Valancin Piepialajeŭ in SB. Belarus today (naming that criticism would be a real overstatement), then only a few authors remain. This is Nastaśsia Vasilevič, the editor of the magazine Art (Belarusian: “Мастацтва”), and Jaŭhienija Bačyła, who cooperates with this printed edition. Unfortunately, the magazine stopped publishing the texts online.
This is the editorial office of the Kantrovy Podcast (Belarusian: “Кантровы падкаст”) Instagram page, which sometimes contains reviews on its page.
And also Nadzieja Buncevič, who continues to work in the newspaper Kultura (Belarusian: “Культура”). The new reality dictates the format of positive texts for her as well. The problem is that a layman risks taking the overall positive assessment at face value.
However, analytics, in the format of which you can openly and without self-censorship highlight both the pros and cons of a certain play, festival and theatre process (without fear of consequences), has completely disappeared in Belarus.
Critics and specialists abroad found themselves in a difficult situation. The productions of the émigré theatre are available to them, but of the collectives working in the country, only a few (the RTBD, one time – the National Academic Bolshoi Opera and Ballet Theatre) organize online broadcasts of performances. From time to time, individual productions are recorded and can be seen on TV or YouTube. Some specialists write not only about Belarusian theater in emigration (Nastassiya Pankratava, Dzianis Marcinonič, Ksienija Kniazieva) but also about foreign (Polish, Moldovan, etc.) theatre (Dźmitry Jermałovič-Daščynski, Ksienija Kniazieva). In the case of the publication Essays on Contemporary Belarusian Theatre translated into Polish, the authors of the texts are indicated by pseudonyms.
Independent media also do not actively address theatrical topics. Compared to other independent media, the Reform pays more attention to culture (they have a separate Telegram channel dedicated to culture), the site dedicated to culture is active (it has a section on theatre), texts about theatres are periodically published in other independent media. The peculiarity of these texts is the anonymity of their authors.
Traditional culture
There is no resource that would accumulate information about the activities of Belarusians in the field of traditional culture: neither a digest of events nor critical materials. And such a project is certainly sorely lacking. Perhaps it would be worth starting with the creation of a bot through which you can anonymously send notifications about events, short reports about them, or readers’ reviews of new editions. Some initiatives dealing with niche cultural products are partially working on user-generated content (we will not name examples for security reasons). Critical materials about releases based on Belarusian traditional music sometimes appear in Polish periodicals, but they are aimed at Polish readers and are too superficial for Belarusians.
In traditional culture, we have to analyze events (holidays, parties, workshops) and publications (books, videos, music releases) almost exclusively. Undoubtedly, it will not be possible to visit all the events even if you want to, but you can visit them virtually with the help of publications in the press or social networks. In the second case, during the analysis, the question arises, if the posts are only for friends, whether it is possible to use such information, and there is no way to ask (as an expert, I work incognito). You can find out about the activities of some informal groups of lovers of traditional culture only on Telegram, you cannot google such information. Curiosity about traditional culture increases in emigration, and sometimes a certain person was not really active in this field in Belarus. For example, I personally do not know some of the current activists, since we live in different countries, and I often find out about various initiatives by chance.
Speaking of publications, music releases, and videos are often published online and can be analyzed. With books, it is more difficult, but I try to keep track of the novelties published in Belarus and abroad and buy them for my library, so I think that most of the publications still come into my focus.
Section 2. “Evaluating the performance techniques of those who dance on a minefield is ungrateful and sometimes simply inappropriate.”
Individual opinions about the critic’s anonymity, their right to subjectivity, and the need to analyze inaccessible content.
“I think criticism can only be subjective, although it is definitely worth striving for objectivity. Unfortunately, if the expert cannot reveal his/her identity, the author’s position is perceived as a step towards objectivity, so there are claims in the community whose activities are being analyzed.”
“Sometimes critics don’t want to say their names. A connection with an extremist resource, an overly critical response, in general, the possibility of any assessment gives the creators a reason for hiding the facts from him/her. The field of Belarusian culture is very narrow, and it is difficult for the creator to accept comments. Whether we are in principle ready for criticism as such is a debatable question. First of all, Belarusian culture lacks attention and vitality. Evaluating the performance technique of those who dance on a minefield is ungrateful and sometimes simply inappropriate.”
“Coverage of current events and trends is an important step for understanding the real state of today’s Belarusian culture, and only on the basis of objective knowledge can conclusions and plans be made. I don’t think anyone is opposed to the fact that a feeling of lightness should remain from analytics, and intellectual games and irony expose ideas, but this is not such an easy stylistic work.
There are problems with lack of access to primary sources, but that always happens, even in open societies. There is a sense to analyze an unattainable product, even if it is the work of a few individuals and concerns a narrow circle of specialists. One way or another, through such information, the feeling of absence disappears, connections are built, and new projects arise on their basis. It is necessary to delve deeper and cooperate, ask uncomfortable questions, do not be lazy to do research, and find ways to bypass censorship, not forgetting about the danger.
The ability to analyze even in the absence of accurate facts is the job of an analyst. Analysis is not only a speech to the public, it is rather a work of self-development. And here it is important to understand one’s professionalism, belonging to the circle.”
“The problem which remains is access to films — the very products of creativity. Some of them can be watched thanks to personal contacts with the creators. Some of them can be watched at film festivals in different countries. At the same time, film critics have to attend film festivals usually at their own expense or, if possible, with the support of grant programmes or sponsors. Media resources at best only offer support with accreditation (the latter in itself is also important). An additional opportunity to see the festival films is online accreditation.”
“The situation is aggravated by the need for me and some colleagues to speak anonymously. This, of course, does not add credibility to what is written. In the end, anonymity and conspiracy have been a good tradition of good Belarusian literature since the time of Adel from Ustroń and Jaśka-haspadar from Vilnius.
And at the same time, the anonymity of reviews was useful and comfortable for me as an author. And not only because the haters (if there were any at all) missed the target. First of all, paradoxically, I felt a greater responsibility for the evaluations due to the impossibility of signing the work, there was an effort to deprive them of subjectivity. There was no manipulation and getting back at the opponents – purely so as not to give yourself away😊. I will try to keep the achieved mindset in the future.
We all strive for a holistic assessment of Belarusian culture, without divisions and limitations, which are already imposed on our creators by circumstances. This desire, I hope, will not decrease. I consider it one of my missions to unite non-literary narratives to counter atomization and hostility in the book community. The enmity, by the way, noticeably decreased after the writing fraternity was scattered around the world. The emergence of numerous micro-opportunities for Belarusian authors (foreign publishing houses with various policies, residencies, grants, and educational programmes in humanitarianism) in the place of a stifling cultural ghetto is an unconditional plus of the situation, which should be used here and now.
Unfortunately, these opportunities are closed to dozens of authors who are behind bars in Belarus. This is absolutely unacceptable, horrible and inhumane. Their release is an unconditional goal and value, at least for me personally.”
Section 3 “We have to do our job, maintain the current level and wait for better times”
Individual opinions that, we hope, will turn into bridges to the future
“There is a lack of an active website about culture with a large section about theatre, which would analyze all the plays available to the authors and which would be updated very actively. Ideally, we would have high-quality video versions of all foreign performances that could be watched anywhere in the world, showing their level.
Problems typical for art critics (burnout, the need to engage in some kind of daily work for income, instability of financing projects for critics) were, are and, perhaps, will remain in the near future. Now there are no tools to change the situation. Therefore, we just have to do our job, maintain the current level, and wait for better times”
“It would be nice to be able to work under my own name, get comments and conduct in-depth interviews, organize focus groups with lovers of traditional culture. It would be nice to be accredited for events. For now, we are not looking at what is being done de facto, but only what is being published and what is safe to report, i.e. “looking where there is light”, without digging particularly deep, without reporting plans”.
“It is safe to say: there is a stable demand for information about national cinema from its own audience, both in Belarus and in the diaspora. It is difficult to say precisely about the size and exact wishes of the regular audience without some additional research. The situation is not helped by the presence of Belarusians in the Russian language field. Here, it is difficult for Belarusian film critics and journalists to compete with Russian-speaking authors in covering the events of world cinema.
The solution is seen in other forms of contact with the audience – podcasts, vlogs on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. This, by the way, is related to one of the main trends of modern journalism – the focus of the audience on audiovisual content. Combined with the original author’s presentation, this should help expand the audience of text materials and analytics.
It should be taken into account that the modern audience of consumers of information about cinema is no longer divided into conventionally “quality” and conventionally “mass”. Rather, the division takes place according to the commitment to different genres and directions (festival cinema, horror or TV series fans, etc.). Each of these audiences has its own level of competence and circle of authoritative experts. There is a great danger in limiting yourself to a separate topic – I would not like Belarusian film criticism to be locked in a kind of national ghetto.”
“I really hope that the critic community will wake up from its lethargy and we will have a full-fledged literary digest consisting of reviews, at least 30 pages in a PDF format every month. I consider this a great need for the current literary process.
I would like to thank my colleagues who also work in the field of literary analysis, collecting material on which I largely base my conclusions. This is the portal bellit.info of the International Union of Belarusian Writers, the website and social networks of the Belarusian PEN, the initiative of Valer Hapiejeŭ bellit.store – a segregator of “popular” book reviews, the monthly newspaper Literary Belarus (Belarusian: “Літаратурная Беларусь”). As well as the cultural sections of reform.news, svaboda.org and other mass media, podcasts of “Litradio” and other platforms. I believe that our collective work on documenting this uncertain time is extremely necessary for people who think critically, as well as for those who will want to understand in the future what we are going through today.”
“In the Belarusian space, the question remains open: is a critic and analyst of culture a profession?” Based on my survey, the answer is no. And it is not easy to make a living with that. Analytical activity is episodic and poorly paid. It relies more on enthusiasm, obsession, and understanding of need. And it has no professional prospects in the competitive Western world.
To get out of the crisis, we need a critical open analysis, but positive achievements should always be present as well. The ability to understand what the absence of facts indicates and what it leads to. Providing information in an open field, the more authoritative and established, can add feedback and attract more attention from readers domestically. Cooperation with foreign media will always be perceived as success and promotion. Paying attention to intellectual, conceptual work, it is there that new forms of speech will emerge, in tune with the times. Trying to create prospects, not only for information but also for new projects.
I feel the need for an online platform where you can find up-to-date information about the events of Belarusian art around the world, supplemented by visual material and critical analysis. Such a resource could perform the role of a permanent archive of the present and serve as a basis for research work. I myself would gladly work in the conversational genre. I would like it to be simple language, direct contact.”
“Music criticism, as well as art criticism in general, does not have enough resources. Most of the people who compose Belarusian music do it when they return from (their primary) work. In such circumstances, only true fanatics remain on the playing field. There is nothing to attract new players, and the narrow circle of interested people remains narrow.
In an ideal picture, several media would have to write about Belarusian music every day. They would compete and motivate each other to become better, they would use different approaches and styles, and they would be read by different audiences. Unfortunately, this would not work as a business model and could only be possible through grants.
I also believe that the number of texts about music would strengthen the unity of active authors having one idea. The former Experty was a good example. The affirmation for tomorrow for today’s art critics is to unite and motivate each other to express themselves.”
