Articles

Abstract

The phenomenon of contemporary art is not monolithic and includes a variety of trends. Elite art is the most relevant for cultural reflection and scientific analysis, characterized by the search for new forms, criticism of socio-cultural problems of our time through an artistic demonstration of a dramatic decline in society, loss of human values, pessimistic attitudes of individuals in the modern world. The author of the article draws parallels between contemporary Russian art of this trend and 20th-century Western European and American art. Turning to the Western European and American art’s critical reflection, widely represented in Soviet aesthetics, the author of the article extrapolates this criticism to contemporary Russian art, because socialist realism as a style disappeared after the fall of the Soviet Union and Russian art began to develop within the global capitalist trends of art. This article is written in the long-overdue historical approach to the consideration of the problems of Soviet aesthetics. In that regard, it is one of the rare and pioneering studies. The article is informative: it consolidates both the views of renowned scientists at the time and their books and academic papers, which are almost impossible to find in one context in the recent scientific literature. This study has the potential to start a discussion about modifying the approach to the Soviet heritage of Russian aesthetics and to initiate the beginning of the next stage of a truly unbiased research in this field, that can be undertaken due to the thirty-year period separating us from the Soviet era.