Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Stalin's mistake

Stalinist culture considered that it represented the only escape from history and that the rest of the world had not yet entered the realm of pure mythology but remained historical. And it was here that Stalinist culture encountered its limit--it was swept away by the forces of history, because unlike Christianity it had failed to establish itself in the superhistorical; and when the extrahistorical competes with the historical, it inevitably loses, because it is fighting on alien ground.
Boris Groys

Saturday, December 23, 2006

I can

Here, in the West, culture has long ago become an object of consumption, a consumer property. What does culture mean for them? Culture is what I can have. As a result of my being free. And what does it mean free? — I am free to have what everyone here has. Does culture exist in the West? It does. Thus I can and I have the right to use it. And what does it mean: I can? Well, just — physically, pragmatically — I can.
Andrei Tarkovsky