Few things during our transition have sounded as hollow as occasional timid appeals for greater care for culture. Its insignificance, further denigrated by those platitudes, has reached the level where professional politics no longer perceives culture as an area whose regulation it should worry about. It exists in the executive branch only thanks to some departmental task, which, well, it has it on its list. Nobody wants that, that unfortunate culture, as we can hear after almost all coalition negotiations, and this lack of interest, to a greater or lesser extent, has been going on since the nineties. During that period, little other than political loyalty was valued during the selection of management personnel in the institutional sphere of culture, in which the appointees would generally retain their mandates in positions and decorate their CVs with them, counting on the rule that once one steps into office in our country you function in the functions until retirement. As the list of those who wanted to hibernate is long, the ruling political groups did not have to worry about the eventual appearance of some critical activity in the field of culture. That harmlessness, in which rare attempts to disturb political power are usually reduced to some pseudo-subversion or polemic with some kind of abstractions and generalities, has dominated our cultural scene to such an extent that no one thinks that it should look different anymore. Anyone who clung to functions in that long-term irrelevance was greeted by set and well-trodden paths along which culture and art were persistently guided through the spaces of native themes, private anxieties, the Mediterranean azure and subtle polemics with gods and history. That "fine" culture did not get its hands dirty with anything that produced a state of general artistic and intellectual apathy now and here. On the contrary, at every appearance of some criticism that would step into the mire of our reality from the area of culture and art, "well-intentioned" appeals, such as: "Politics have no place in culture!" "Let's not pollute culture with politics!"; "Culture should promote beautiful things!". By the way, politicians and their apparatchiks really have no place in culture, but politics as it is.
Everyone who belongs to the local cultural and artistic scene must know that precisely all those who are interested in seeing that nothing changes in those areas will benevolently advise him not to be a homo politicus but to offer some beauty to a people who have already suffered enough. About the same as, a little more than a year ago, the head of the sector for the fight against organized crime and corruption asked journalists not to burden people with the crimes of criminals, but to promote the achievements of our talents. This kind of concern for the peace of mind of the public is characteristic of any autocracy, so when the government starts calling for the pursuit of beauty, start seriously planning where you will run to. The history of the last century best shows us the extreme epilogues of such cultural policies. While in the Nazi concentration camps the destruction of a nation became, as Hannah Arendt would say, a mere technological process (emptied of all human feeling and even hatred), German culture was ruled by schlagers and sentimental art; as, while the goulash was being filled, the beauty of Russian nature was celebrated by various prishvini, and the audience was pampered by the exotic from the ballet scenes Bayadere i Bakhchisaray fountains. Of course, the true tasks of art are quite different. Not only social reality but also all beauty should be permanently questioned by art, because social as well as aesthetic values are mostly the children of some power system, and, by the nature of things, the power system always affirms what it can in any way serve to maintain power. In simpler words - culture and art must be areas of constant critical review and conflict of opinions, not beautiful scenes. This alone makes culture alive and opposes it to the authoritarian concept that it is a mere depot of memorabilia and an activity whose primary purpose should be to relieve the subjects from stress.
There, of course, we come to the field of alternative, independent culture and all those neo-avant-garde hybrids that were born by the confused freedom of the new age. But, alas, they were also largely infected by some lapurartist virus. More precisely, what belonged to the mainstream, as well as what was advertised as an independent scene and alternative, deprived of a few enthusiasts, was equally uninterested in the sporka authorities and equally responsible for the multi-decade duration of this hushed culture of ours. And while the first in the softness of their opportunism hovered over the fungus of reality, the alternatives rummaged through it with their hermetic subversions, which they usually throw to the threshold of the space in which they are exhibited or performed, because our alternatives firmly believe that self-sufficiency and non-communicativeness are what define them.
And why is it surprising that there are no artists and independent intellectuals in any important decision-making place. It will be that the government is not so much to blame for this as it is the guilty ones, those who do not want to get dirty with politics and who in their "spiritist sessions" breathe and invoke the spirits of the great artistic revolutionaries of the past. And even if someone was summoned, what would that traitor do? Probably, like Christ in Ivan Karamazov's poem, he would sit, be silent and listen to some Grand Inquisitor of creative industries, who could freely quote his Karamazov predecessor: "Why did you come now, to bother us?"
And so, while for years our artists and intellectuals brooded over their fascinations from the past and generality, waiting for some just demiurge to put the world in order again, during that time the cultural apparatchiks selected by the government worked, worked, worked... It was precisely with this preoccupation that this completely harmless culture, and in recent years DPS Zemana one of the more effective strategies for its total blunting was aimed at the needs of the contemporary moment and younger generations, work for young people is always a winning combination. However, this "noble" ambition did not imply any educational-liberating strategy in culture, but simply pandering to the expectations of generations formed by the reality of the transition of our region. Elem, as the majority of that population is satisfied, and thus loyal, only when they have a good time, entertainment was offered, in forms that were supposed to show sensitivity to new phenomena of cultural expression of young people. Thus, various parties on the beaches, sampling and mixing, fashion-connected and fashion weeks got patrons in the institutional culture. That innovation was presented as a high degree of understanding of the times in which we live, so the official culture of the people instead of beauty offered snobbery. One would say, an equally effective, if not more effective, phenomenon for additional anesthetization of an already anesthetized youth. Someone thought that it could also be called a creative industry, since anything can be fitted into that cultural model anyway, which opened the budget doors wide for various projects of DJing and clubbing experts. The benefits that the government had from those electronic Potemkin backdrops influenced the complete ignoring of the construction on whose wormhole boards not only current culture but also what we call cultural heritage was held. And while in Žabljak Crnojevića, the walls of the country's first capital city have been torn up for years, and while due to the devastation, UNESCO is threatening us with removing Kotor from the World Heritage List, and an asphalt road and a railway track pass through the most important archaeological site, pride, the government that burned for Montenegrin cultural identity she was pouring money for entertainment with electronic sounds, all with an oath to eternal Montenegro.
Let's face it, lounging on the beaches with beer and the hedonistic concepts of "artists" whose authorship is reduced to making musical patchwork from existing music and computer-generated inserts, is not so much problematic for aesthetic as for ethical reasons. Because this type of (sub)cultural expression is devoid of any critical relationship to reality, from which it selects only those contents that serve exclusively private pleasure, thus creating an extremely desirable cultural model for any government interested in a high degree of social apathy of its subjects. One of the most devastating data in the devastating statistics of our (non)reaction to the government's hogwash is hidden in the fact that every beach and meadow party had a larger number of attendees than all protests against the government during the last ten years. And that's where we should look for an answer to that question - how did it happen that our political leadership, whose representatives can only warm the hearts of turbo-folk songs, became a serious admirer and financier of electronic music. Simply, it was based on simple logic - the more cries of "hands goreee!", of some electronic shamans at the mixing desks, are heard all over our coasts, ramparts and meadows, the more peacefully the government will sleep. And why would anyone, in those explosions of sound and light, go dark with the state of culture, or God forbid in politics, when everything is so cool. This hedonistic engineering created a cultural model that also played a significant role in amnestying the government from responsibility for three decades of work on creating a society with a disturbed value system. If you don't believe that this is so, let him run through social networks and count all those photos of wild youth that are usually accompanied by the comment "Life is beautiful!" reality. I believe that such comparisons and analyzes would give us the right answer to the question - how did it come to be that what we are living the generations to come can in any context consider, as the women of Podgorica would say, "too beautiful".
The hope that after the dismissal of the DPS, the culture would be something more than a mere decoration installed at the will of the politicians, quickly faded away. The newly formed government has made culture even more irrelevant and invisible, which was hinted at at the start by its reduction to a departmental stump in a mega-ministry. After the apostolic government cleared out the old gang and, as the genre dictates, replaced their external DJing and calving experts with experts who came from god-pleasing paraliterary-paramilitary formations, the "in-depth" insinuations of the rumps and tails, both from the party structures and and from those of relatives, brothers and godfathers. Even then, it never occurred to anyone to rummage through the cooled ashes of culture and maybe find something that still burns a little. And just as the old government succeeded with its projects in culture to raise the hedonistic needs of a good part of its most vital population and make them passive observers of the ugly social reality, so the so-called apostolic government, by favoring cultural content of a primarily religious and traditionalist character, turned part of cultural life into silence and left part of it to the revisionist ambitions of the winners of the newly created national-ideological circumstances.
It is clear that the political groups in these areas could not be expected to affirm any kind of critical culture, which is what the government that truly wants reforms should be working on, but what must deeply worry us lies in the fact that for all that time decades of excesses of culture and its use for purely political purposes, the independent and freed from everything scene of cultured people and intellectuals levitated, laden with resentment, in its hidden prohibitions.
The relationship between politics and culture will not fundamentally change through the system and institutions, even through some of their more advanced versions, anyone who has even peeked into that space knows that. This is also known to those who are a little more familiar with advanced normative and institutional solutions in the cultural policies of the highly developed world, where culture and art are increasingly chained to the laws of the market. That's why all those artists who have opted for some kind of internal exile, waiting for the attitude towards culture to change due to a change in the political climate, must understand that in the times and circumstances we live in, this generally does not happen. More precisely, we have made sure that this does not happen. Even if one day we get rid of arrogant partitocrats of all stripes, they will most likely be replaced by some narrow-minded technocrats, who will respond to every mention of the need for a more sensitive attitude towards culture and art with the neoliberal mantra: "There is no free lunch." Until it is understood in the circles of exiles that the position of culture and art in a so-called democratic society primarily depends on those who create culture and art and not on those who organize them, we will continue this state in which the independent scene together with high culture will continue his autistic way of life, and the more visible and politically suitable culture will continue to be divided into a part that conforms to the rules of transitional entertainment and a part where mostly contemplation, methanizing and fiddling are done.
Life is beautiful! Really beautiful!
The author is a writer and literary critic
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