Was Ist Kunst?, asks Raša Todosijević. What is culture?, I ask myself, half seriously, averse to definitions and everything rounded and final. I don't know, so I'm still looking for that answer; no one knows, because that knowledge cannot be complete by the nature of things: sve can only be known about something that is dead. And yet, here's a little, handy, almost private definition of mine, which, again, I like to think is more widely applicable. Beauty + Freedom = ahem, Culture. It comes with art. There are those, I call them Aesthetes, who think that Beauty is the only important thing, and you can do without Freedom; sometimes, they say, it's even better that way. There are also those, I call them Activists, who believe that Freedom is everything, and Beauty is more of a luxury, leisure, bourgeois occupation. If they are right, one or the other, I have spent my life madly searching for the harmony between Beauty and Freedom, looking for it in every book I curiously took from the bookshop or library shelf, in every panel on which I lowered the needle of my Tosca 25, in to every film before the beginning of which I impatiently dilated my pupils in the Adriatic, the Balkans or the Cinematheque, in every show I watched, breathing in joy the beauty of dust from the theater boards. And also, oh yes, in every newspaper that wrote "about culture", only if they didn't dead about dead, but alive and bright (not necessarily joyfully), smart and cheeky, revealing and polemical, offensive towards stupidity and parloge, open towards everything new and different, but again not condescending and skorojević-like as if the world started from them and this morning, but being a natural home and refuge of spark, rebellion, openness , knowledge, understanding, will, faith. Because newspapers, you know, are precious and important: a good newspaper is an ally of Beauty and a herald of Freedom, just as bad newspapers are (and such newspapers either don't deal with the so-called culture, or only promote the coroner's culture of death) all sorts of social and mental mold that strives to conquer and kill the world. By the way: let's not talk about technological changes - when I say newspapers here, I also mean portals, radio, television, everything fckn platforms, whatever they are called. It's all good as long as what Woody Guthrie said about his guitar, no coincidence in 1941, machines that kill fascists. Oh, terrible, neighbors and sweet sister, does culture, that sublime activity of beautiful souls, deal with killing?! Of course not, God forbid: she's only in the business of killing fascists. By killing them in the concept. Many never recover from it.
Decades after noticing that bad habit, I still have no idea what it is culture, but I know, I already glimpse something about what Beauty and Freedom are, and I enjoy them with undiminished passion, in every song by Cave or Swans, in the dark whisper of Tricky and the bass line of Massive Attack, in the stage magic of Urban and the ruthlessness of Frljic, in new art television after the film's suicide, in the divine face of Juliette Binoche and the post-punk vamp Charlotte Gainsbourg, in scenes from the world of Biljana Đurđević, in the novels of Zady Smith or Rushdie, the schizomelancholic Krasnakhorkai or the perfectly controlled Elena Ferrante. Among those who write for newspapers, honestly and well, about what we are equally interested in, whether from the past or now, were called Tirnanići or Mandići, Jergovići or Pavićiči, Medenice or Vlajčići.
In rare moments of leisure, I look behind me and, what do I see? Since I was not interested in a "career", nor a lot of money, nor any kind of social power arising from the so-called decision lever (I was too lazy for all that, and I was lazy because I couldn't find a motive), I tried to arrange my life so that I was surrounded only by what I love and what means to me, and to write about it, that is, to be my profession, my hobby, my passion, my dream, my restlessness, and my passion. Which actually means that I'm a lifelong man without a profession who, if we're honest, doesn't do anything because work, my dear, is a chore and a pain (just like our president, who every morning congratulates himself in love for getting up at all), and I I never struggled and struggled, but always did only what made me happy. Well, is that work worthy of a serious man?! Anyway, it's just pure enjoyment, here, I regretfully admit, but I don't regret it. And then there are still some people who reward you for it... All kinds of things, and so many hard workers of culture, media and everything else are suffering and it's hard for them, and no one even looks at them kindly, injustice, so that's you.
