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My main concern with this question is that it is based on a totally invalid presumption, namely that the fall of communism caused effects only in East-Central Europe. The fall of the iron curtain was the end of a paradigm (the Yalta paradigm, or the three-players-game paradigm), the end of approximately 50 years of division within so-called "Western culture." This division led to a hostile separation between mainstream, West-Western countries and the peripheries, the "East side" of Western culture. This was the last chapter in a "three-player-game" whose main battlefield was propaganda, and where contemporary art played the role of a sort of a Manhattan project. The West-Western politicians were totally unprepared for the end of the game, in which they also had to give up their comfortable positions. They thought that they simply won, and had no doomsday scenarios. This led to several tragedies, including the war in Bosnia, the Fukuyama failure of West-Western intellectuals. But beyond that, perhaps The Single Most Important Thing That Changed in East/Central European Art After the Fall of Communism is that contemporary art became less context-bound. Previously, there was a very strong repressive attention, manipulated public life, censorship, and the general public lost trust in official forums and learned how to read between the lines, how to take the context of repression into consideration. This created a strong, solidarity-filled attention, which is now over. Recent works can be understood with greater ease, with less attention, because they are less context-based, more viewer-friendly, and one doesn't have to know the whole sad history of the complicated country to decipher an art piece. |
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