On December 24th, a public lecture on fine arts took place at University Building 3 as part of the project called “Del arte Club” organised by VSU Centre of Culture. This time Evgeny Kambalin, a Voronezh artist, gave a lecture on “How to understand today’s reality and what is art today?”
According to the lecturer, the key tendency is that what people want today is not art, they are keen on something ugly and monstrous, and the question is why this is happening and what we can do to change the current situation. How has it happened, that today we do not appeal to our ratio and never ask the crucial question - why? Evgeny Kambalin wanted to characterise today’s era of postmodernism by comparing it to the previous periods - the traditional and modern. Referring to such philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Félix Guattari, and Jean Baudrillard, the lecturer named the following characteristics of the modern world - death of the human, the assault on reason, no hierarchies, death of the artist, no ideas, and total inanity.
For Evgeny Kambalin, the task of a modern artist is to make everything meaningless. Modern artists produce nothing but emptiness. “A man living in the postmodern era cannot die as he is dead already”, – concluded the lecturer. Many of the ideas and conclusions provoked questions from the audience and heated discussions after the lecture.
Denis Bulavintsev, an artist, made pictures of the events, capturing the atmosphere.
“Del arte Club” project will continue its work after the New Year holidays. There will be even more interesting lectures concerning various aspects of fine arts.
