Monday, October 23, 2006

Entartete Kunst?

A prominent Russian art dealer was recovering last night after being attacked by youths who smashed his gallery and destroyed paintings by an ethnic Georgian artist.


Russian television showed a video of paintings by Alexander Dzhikia that had been ripped from their frames, torn up and scattered around the gallery, The Times wrote.

This story gives me a very strange feeling. I am not in Moscow now, so it's difficult to judge. But after officials apperently started deporting Georgians from Moscow and asked schools in the capital to provide them with a list of pupils with Georgian surnames and then questioned the children about where their parents lived, for an outsider it really seems things are getting out of hand. This is scary. Where did we see this before?

In the meantime I wonder what the effect of this wave of anti-Georgian sentiment is on the warm relationship between Zurab Tsereteli and Yuri Luzhkov.

(On the image: Death in the museum (1997) by Alexander Dzhikia)

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