CULTURE

Apparent Demise of AMG Hits Russia’s Arts Publishing Industry

By Chris Gordon

The St. Petersburg Times

Anyone browsing Russian newsstands for an art magazine to read on the long flight or train ride home would be forgiven for thinking that Russians just don’t care about the subject. Among the various interior design and home improvement titles available for purchase — most of which are local outlets for international brands — it is hard to find a single magazine dedicated to contemporary art.

While nothing new, the situation was made worse recently with the demise of Moscow-based Art Media Group, after owner Valery Nosov was indicted on charges of fraud and embezzlement in connection with a government post he held from 2007 to 2008. Art Media Group was responsible for the publication of Black Square, the online arts portal OpenSpace and the Russian version of Art and Auction. It was one of the flashiest and most visible players on the contemporary art scene and acted as partner to numerous high profile events and exhibitions internationally.

As a result of the closure, the company’s swanky digs have been vacated, its office equipment sold off and its staff reportedly left waiting to be paid their final wages. Buyers and investors are being sought far and wide to recoup loses and revive at least some of the group’s projects. However, this seems unlikely considering that, according to one source close to the owners, the group had been hemorrhaging $300,000 a month and closed with debts of $1 million still on its ledgers.

The group went quiet after a June 2 letter to readers on the OpenSpace web site saying that the media frenzy surrounding the end of the project “bears no relation to reality,” that the site would “shortly begin to function at its former capacity,” and that the economy is to blame for its woes. Over at the Art Media Group web site, the simple announcement of a Spring 2010 re-launch acts as a placeholder.

This is not the first time that an important arts publication has gone under, dashing Russia’s hopes for a sustained presence on the international art scene. Just last year Hermitage Magazine (formerly published by this newspaper’s parent company, Independent Media) folded after high production costs and plummeting ad sales as a result of the economic slowdown made the project untenable. More than a year after control reverted to the museum, there has still been no official announcement from the Hermitage of its publication plans. Art Chronica, one of Russia’s few remaining contemporary art magazines, is also said to be feeling the pressures of an indifferent readership and a lack of capital.

Apathy on the part of subscribers and a general dearth of investment means that the prospect for art magazines in Russia is grim indeed. The country is not alone in facing the crisis in traditional publishing, but compared to Western Europe and the U.S., where single countries are able to support numerous publications catering to all sectors of the art-appreciating public, Russia has trouble supporting even one.

Olesya Turkina, curator of contemporary art at the Russian Museum, sees “the absence of art magazines as symptomatic of the general absence of an infrastructure for contemporary art in Russia.” And while this means that “Russian art has been extremely free since Perestroika, it also means that the mechanisms which support and nurture it have never emerged.”

Another part of the problem is that in Russia today, art is the province of an elite who are attracted more by the value it ads to their status and the opportunities it provides to display their wealth than by a commitment to social ideals. A far cry, then, from Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), the remarkable turn-of-the-century art journal edited by Sergei Diaghilev and financed by two influential Moscow-based patrons of Russian art who championed the idea of art for art’s sake.

But all is not as bleak as it may at first seem. The latest cause for optimism comes from Daria Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, which mounts world-class exhibitions and has been in negotiations with London-based Cultureshock Media to oversee the creation of an own-brand publication to promote its vision of the Russian art world.

One can only hope that the terrific job the center has been doing with its exhibition program will translate into an inspiring read that will attract people from all walks of life. Without a broad readership, any new magazine attempting to capture the imagination of a Russian readership will be doomed to fail. That may not be a problem for a company with unlimited resources but, as recent history has shown, in this age of financial uncertainty nothing can be taken for granted.

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