“Savage malice is a peculiarity of our society”

– When you see people photographing themselves with works of art in the background, what feelings does it arouse in you?
– A little bit of irritation, a little bit of pity. Irritation because they are disturbing other people. After all, what is the real reason why museums ban photography? To prevent it disturbing those who are truly interested in the museum. That’s the first emotion. The second is that it’s a pity when people are photographing themselves as they aren’t properly looking at the paintings. If you are taking photos so as to remember, it means you won’t remember anything. You won’t have the memory that comes from the impression made by the picture, the building, the city or whatever. The same thing happens with people who read detailed explanations under the paintings. At one point I came back full of enthusiasm about the National Gallery in London – the captions under the paintings there are a separate, serious art form in themselves. But our chief artist said to me: “Mikhail Borisovich, just watch what someone does after reading a label like that.”
– What do they do?
– Turn around and move on. Without looking at the painting itself. Although, of course, everyone has the right to photograph, to take a selfie, that’s already part of present-day culture. We even play along with it sometimes: at the exhibition of the Henkin brothers’ photographs there is a special place set aside for taking selfies.
– But has what people call “the consumption of culture” changed today, in a technologically completely new time?
– The task of museums is to educate the uneducated. But they have to be educated by presenting them with a difficult product that needs to be comprehended, at least in part, and not by descending to their level. So, in actual fact the Hermitage has performed a very important mission: in the past 70 years, totally uneducated people have come in crowds to the Hermitage and become educated. There was a time when the majority of people in the country, even if they did not come to the Hermitage, knew that they could. And a fairly significant proportion of people perceived world art not just through the reproductions that were printed regularly in Ogonyok.
– Why are you speaking in the past tense?
– Because that is no longer the case. Talking with people, I can see that a major slump has occurred…
– And when did it occur?
– At the time of perestroika, when people began to occupy themselves with their own affairs. Some were simply saving themselves from the situation; others on the contrary were exploiting it to make money. It was then that money became in every sense the main thing. People’s striving to improve themselves through education diminished. A whole generation simply had no time to do so.
Now a certain return to culture is underway. The new generation for whom, generally speaking, money is no longer so important, indeed everything is not so important, is open to art. Our student club is simply bursting from the numbers wanting to join. On Students’ Day in the Hermitage they are really hanging from the chandeliers; because going to see contemporary art is interesting.
– But do they understand it?
– They find it interesting; they come to see it. But there is nothing special about contemporary art. You just need to grasp that two times two isn’t always four and that the black in some shadows can be white or even red. And to find that pleasurable.
– You have been director of the Hermitage for a quarter of a century now. How have the museum visitors changed in that period and your attitude to them?
– Our visitors are always roughly the same, if we discount the period that we were talking about. We get around four and a bit million a year – that was the figure before perestroika and still is now. But when I began, the Hermitage did not even get a million visitors, and half of those were foreigners. Today the majority come from this country. The second thing, which is very important, is that we have kept our local Petersburg visitors, although now I am sounding the alarm as the number of Petersburgers is dropping. That means we have to do something.
– Young people, as you say, flock to see contemporary art; a fashion for “higher things” has been proclaimed. But we began our conversation with the epidemic of selfies in museum halls and other delights of the “digital consumption” of art. Doesn’t this fashion and the fascination with “the digital” hinder the proper appreciation of the sublime?
– I do not find anything bad in digitalized perception. It’s bad though, when the state basis its relationship with culture on digital data. When both the ministry and the government reckon that by counting visitor numbers you can assess the quality of a museum’s work – that is a primitive digital approach. While normal digital imagery means, for example, a quick understanding of texts where all the vowels are omitted. That is quick thinking, rapid association.
– Quick thinking in the appreciation of art… is that possible?
– Yes. I myself, for example, am not bothered by crowds in any museum. I see the paintings anyway. Even if people are jostling me, they don’t bother me. Because hanging there are paintings I more or less know. In general, everything can be done quickly. If you are well prepared, if you are able to commune with works of art for a long time, then you can also do it quickly.
– And how many people are there, who are capable of communing with culture at that level? It must be hundredths of one percent.
– There are a fair number. But the main thing in that interaction is that people should respect culture. That’s what it’s about… Nowadays I sometimes have to hear people saying that it’s a good thing there are no military people in the museum, whereas previously whenever you came there were soldiers going around. No, it’s a great pity they’re not there! We are actively trying to change that, to get more of the military coming in. Previously all the officer cadets who studied in Leningrad passed through the Hermitage. Yes, at first they were made to, but then they started to come of their own accord. People need to be enticed somehow. The main thing is that when they address culture, they should take off their hats. In actual fact that is our chief tragedy – a failure to grasp what a terrible gulf has formed between society and culture.
– What do you mean?
– Any kind of problem connected with culture evokes an excess of malicious glee in society. And it is being stoked all the time: culture is nothing; cultural figures are swindlers, thieves, conmen, fornicators, perverts, and so on and so forth. That’s the general tendency. Take the situation with Kirill Serebriannikov. A savage delight in society – just look, a theatre director, and what he got caught doing. If some case involves the organizers of a restoration or building project, the Ministry of Culture, you get the same. It emerges that a general tendency has somehow come into being in our society.
– And what’s to be done about it?
– It needs to be countered in a serious fashion. Because it leads to society turning savage, when society as a whole holds culture and people of culture in contempt and the average person thinks that culture is unnecessary or only necessary for certain defined goals – such as the manipulation of the public consciousness and so on. In this case the average person is the citizen in the street and the citizen working in major institutions. Such disrespect for culture exists alongside a political and consumerist attitude towards it. When we are on bad terms with the whole world and tussling with everyone, the desire arises to use culture in those tussles: “Aha, since you’ve done this and that, we won’t let you have this exhibition…” That is very dangerous, because sometimes culture is the only remaining bridge connecting the two banks.
– Do those in power understand that?
– We are trying to prevent the bridge from being blown up, but attempts of that sort are being made all the time. The President, too, at the Cultural Forum in St Petersburg spoke about politicians and people in the arts having the same work only on opposite sides: one lot build bridges, the others burn them. But they need to be kept intact. Culture is the only sphere, apart from armaments, in which we are competitive. And we should make political use of the high level of our culture and not with refusals and bans. They should not exist and there should be a functioning mechanism for communicating with society.
– But there isn’t one, or if there is it isn’t working well. Why?
– Among the characteristics of our society is an absolute distrust of one another. Of everyone – the law-enforcement bodies, the authorities. The number of people arrested shows that nobody is to be trusted and the presumption of innocence is a presumption of guilt. Accordingly, there is a complete distrust of cultural figures. We didn’t have that even in the Soviet era. And our society has another peculiarity – that is savage malice.
– In the 25 years that you have been Hermitage Director, has the level of that malice changed in any way?
– It has grown. It began at the time of the collapse of the Soviet regime. Now, when that regime has gone, the malice has been let out; it’s in the air – and where is it to go? And here another peculiarity of ours comes into play – absolute over-reaction. People get worked up without cause, when a minor misdeed is considered a crime.
– You are talking about a sick society…
– Of course, it’s sick. That’s why we should be healing it, above all by explaining what culture is. We present this complex world, tell people about various categories of art. The most ordinary person and the biggest boss should both understand that culture should exist in its own right for us all to have any significance. You may not like it at all, but it needs to be supported. After all, people tolerated Pasternak, who should have been the first to be shot – he had relatives abroad, and was anti-Soviet, and overly talented, and with the wrong kind of friends… But they put up with him, because everyone said he was a brilliant poet. People’s opinion also turns out to be important.
– But does it have any weight today?
– A bad example is what’s happened to Serebriannikov, while the ballet Nureyev is a good one. People do understand all the same that the production should go ahead, because that is our competitive edge, not even over the world, but over the future.
– What can we expect from the Hermitage in 2018?
– First of all, Hermitage Days that demonstrate the full range of what the museum does, what it brings to society. In 2018 our venues will include Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Yerevan and Amsterdam. We bring along something from the Hermitage collection, but the most important thing is discussion, debate, an exchange of experience. We give lectures on the state of the Hermitage today, discuss, well, for example, to what extent a museum turns wars of memory into a dialogue of cultures. We hold master classes in restoration, and our restorers are absolutely uniquely experienced. We hold master classes in fund-raising – how to accumulate money, how to finance culture.
Well, and if we are speaking of exhibitions, there an encounter with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, our old friends, in the General Staff building. A big Hermitage exhibition in Australia – “Pioneers of Modern Art”. There will be a joint exhibition with the Pushkin Museum of the Leiden Collection with several remarkable Rembrandts. A joint exhibition of masterpieces of the Hermitage and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. There will be celebrations for the 10th anniversary of the Hermitage’s presence in Amsterdam. Right now, there is a huge exhibition of Dutch artists from the Hermitage on there.
– I cannot avoid asking about the storerooms…
– We are making our repositories open in principle. Because there is forever talk going on about the reserve stocks, talk that gives rise to ideas, at times provocative ones akin to what happened in the 1920s – let’s hand over exhibits to other museums, let’s sell some things off… We have been through all that – nothing good came of the redistribution. If you can give things out, it means you can sell them off too. We need to fight against that. In point of fact the reserves, that fund is the most important thing about the museum. It is for its sake that museums exist. The stores need to be made accessible with their content being shown in a special way – that’s how it is being done with us. For example, we have a costume repository and next-door showcases have appeared where those costumes are displayed. Then they are returned to the repository, put away (because they cannot be on show for too long) and others are brought out. Later on, there will be an institute of costumes, the possibility of fashion shows and catwalks.
– How do our museum-goers differ from Westerners?
– In the number of people prepared to come to exhibitions. I am categorically opposed to any kind of reports on visitor numbers, nevertheless often not enough people visit the Hermitage’s external exhibitions. There could be more.
– And that’s it?
–  Nations ought to be brought closer together, but when we start dividing people into “ours” and “not ours” we are reinforcing complexes in ourselves. People need to be taught that life is complex and everything is highly complex. That is in general a slogan for culture – we should make people complex. The Hermitage tries to do so.

Interviewer: Yekaterina Danilova