Confirmation of the Balkan rules

The news that attracted public attention in recent days is the "disappearance" of a certain number of paintings from the collection of the Banovina building in Novi Sad, the seat of the Executive Council of Vojvodina, which were registered by the new provincial authorities upon taking over their duties from their predecessors.

That is why the new provincial authorities formed a commission that should make an accurate list of the missing works, and an expert was hired as the president of the commission - Sava Stepanov, director of the Center for Visual Culture and director of the Zlatno oko gallery. During the inventory of works of art that were in the buildings of the Executive Council of Vojvodina and the Assembly of Vojvodina, the commission found that out of a total of 290 works of art, compared to the previous inventory, about 40 paintings were missing.

INVENT: The biggest problem in determining which pictures are missing is the sloppy documentation, Mr. Stepanov tells "Vreme". The last officially and professionally made inventory of works of art was done ten years ago, and it was made by the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art in Novi Sad. Since then, no professional and qualified person has taken care of the collection, which is another example that indicates the carelessness of the former authorities when it comes to cultural heritage, so due to carelessness it could happen that the pictures simply disappear without being found. he doesn't know exactly when they disappeared, nor exactly which pictures are in question. However, even though the collection located in the Banovina building is valuable and significant, especially when it comes to painting in Vojvodina (canvas of an entire post-war generation of top artists to which Konjović, Boško Petrović, Milivoje Nikolajević belong...), the damage is not as great as it could have been to be.

Mr. Stepanov denies the bombastic and sensationalist writings that the works of Paja Jovanović and Marko Čelebonović were among the stolen canvases. "Čelebonović or Paja Jovanović were never owned by the Executive Council," says Stepanov, who, by looking into the state of affairs, found out that among the forty missing paintings there are only two more valuable canvases. It is about a landscape by Jovan Bijelić, whose value is estimated at about twenty thousand marks, and a large watercolor by Aleksandar Petrov. Other pictures do not have any significant market value.

COLLATERAL TOO BAD: The case in Novi Sad, as well as the events of October 5th in which some important works of art were destroyed, once again confirm the Balkan rule that one of the worst and most tragic "collateral damages" of the discontinuity of the government is artistic treasure. Therefore, the question arises - how to physically protect art from politics.

Significant collections of our masters decorated and decorate numerous local buildings where representatives of the government live. Maybe they have a place, as a transparent part of the national culture that decorates the interior of a residential building, or maybe not. Perhaps galleries or museums are places where painting lovers should enjoy the canvases of great painters, and not that the original paintings of our masters form part of the inventory of offices and waiting rooms, on an equal footing with photos of current presidents, ficus trees and brass ashtrays. And then, with every local revolution, which breaks out here every now and then, the only thing left for art lovers is to list which works of capital national value have disappeared in the mist of history.

THE MARKET KITCHERAYA: Regarding the need for authorities and politicians to furnish their cabinets with top-quality works of art, sociologist Trivo Inđić says that in this sense there are two types of politicians. The first are those who have some idea about art, have a need for a pleasant environment and want to make it known that you are dealing with a serious man and a serious politician. In our country, unfortunately, the second type of half-educated politicians who have absolutely no idea about art, and for whom, being insecure in every sense of themselves, a painting is not a work of art but a status symbol, an object that complements their promotion as a symbol of social ascent and social of status or "movable property". In recent times, "yuppies", professional politicians who care about maintaining contact with the artistic elite, as part of what is called public relations. On the other hand, the painting market has almost completely died out due to the terrible impoverishment of the population. And those who have become rich in connection with crime and political elites in the last ten years, the so-called the newly minted rich are the only ones who have money, and they are the ones who largely dictate the market today. Instead of real estate, they invest in art. That's why the market was reduced to the market of kitsch and the so-called. naive, the only forms that the nouveau riche, in accordance with their aesthetic horizons, recognize as "art".