> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.review.supplies/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Interview with Boris Groys - URL: https://www.review.supplies/interview-with-boris-groys/ - Published: 2024-11-15T00:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-18T22:17:59.000Z - Description: The critic, theorist, and philosopher discusses nationalism, popularity, documentation, and the instability of Orientalist categories. - Author: Finley Rhys *Editor’s note: This conversation was recorded in August 2024 and edited for length and clarity.* Boris Groys is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and a senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. In 2011, he curated the Russian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. His books include *The Total Art of Stalinism*, *Art Power*, *In the Flow*, and *Philosophy of Care*. --- **Finley Rhys:** Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Venice Biennale placed particular emphasis on artists from the Global South. Did this alter the distribution of power within contemporary art? **Boris Groys:** I see no change in art’s power relations. Zero. I see the expansion of existing art institutions into new territories. Every major museum in the United States or Europe has included non-European cultures—Chinese, Japanese, and others—from the beginning, though it included only traditional cultural forms belonging to the past. Today almost every Western museum and major exhibition is expanding its representation of contemporary or recent art from non-European, or rather non-Western, parts of the world. This expansion is already part of the genetic code of Western art institutions, which were conceived from the beginning to present a universal culture. I see no shift in their power structure. The institutions and power structure remain the same, but become more powerful by incorporating what was previously excluded and expanding into new areas. --- **Finley Rhys:** The Biennale’s national pavilions are often treated as remnants of an older geopolitical order. What does this structure still make visible? **Boris Groys:** I like it. The globalized art system has a predictable repertoire of choices and attitudes. In Documenta, or any large exhibition made by one curator or group of curators on a global basis, you often encounter a homogeneous image, as if everyone in the art system feels and thinks more or less the same. National pavilions show that this is not quite the case. There is a general trend, of course, but you also encounter work you would never see in a global exhibition. This may result from the influence of national politics, the pressure exerted by powerful groups, or the presence of locally famous artists whom curators cannot ignore. You suddenly see something excluded from a more homogeneous globalized exhibition. I like this strange effect of the national pavilion structure. --- **Finley Rhys:** Much of the Biennale addressed political issues directly. What compromises does political commitment require of an artist? **Boris Groys:** I am ambivalent. A politically engaged artist is not sovereign. You join an existing movement, party, or political tendency and place your art in the service of its success. You have to be successful as an artist. The most successful artists are not visual artists in the sense we have in mind; they are people like Taylor Swift. The genuinely popular and influential artists of our time are pop singers. The empires they build, however, operate according to commercial rather than political principles. When you have a political goal, support an organization, and use your abilities as an artist to advance its success, you subject your art to the logic of success. I mentioned Taylor Swift deliberately: success is a very strong logic. What you do must be readily accepted by people. They have to like it. This prevents you from being sovereign even within your own art, because the work must be liked from the beginning. Avant-garde artists were less interested in being liked. They imposed, or tried to impose, what they were doing on the public. In some cases, the public followed them; the artists did not follow public taste. Trying to be liked was a nineteenth-century strategy. That century was also the classical period of politically engaged art: Courbet in France, and many politically engaged artists in Russia. They wanted the public to like their work because, if the public does not, the work cannot be politically effective or contribute to the movement’s success. The artist therefore becomes dependent on existing tastes and aesthetic attitudes. This has always been the stigma of socially engaged art: political radicalism is accompanied by aesthetic compromise. Others refuse aesthetic compromise, but one can argue that they compromise politically. Those who refuse both political and aesthetic compromise often move into complete isolation, as did Hugo Ball, the founder of the Dada movement, who abandoned art and began writing cultural criticism. A writer is less dependent on the market, public approval, and the monetary system. It is a question of choice. In which area do you want to be radical and sovereign? Where are you willing to compromise? If you make socially engaged art, aesthetic compromise is unavoidable. --- **Finley Rhys:** Installations and participatory works depend on physical presence, yet they often survive through documentation. What is the relationship between the original event and the record that remains? **Boris Groys:** Traditionally, the difference between an artwork and an ordinary object is that an artwork remains under protection and within a system of conservation. It therefore has a longer duration than an ordinary object. Installations and participatory works, by contrast, have short periods of existence—often shorter than ordinary objects. I recently took part in a project in France involving a participatory work intended to last one thousand years. We will see how that works. Yet none of the installations or participatory works I know have lasted very long. Why, then, do we know about them, and why do they persist in our knowledge and imagination? Only through documentation. They are integrated into a system of art documentation that includes videos, photographs, and textual explanations. This documentation is exhibited from time to time in galleries or large exhibitions such as Documenta. The most obvious way to preserve the memory of installations or participatory events, however, is through virtual reality. Once we ask how to remember short-term, time-based art, the connection between documentation and the artistic event, or between physical and virtual space, becomes obvious. --- **Finley Rhys:** Do the categories “Western” and “non-Western” remain useful for thinking about art? **Boris Groys:** The answer depends on what we mean by Western and non-Western. I grew up in Russia, and until I was thirty-five my friends were Russian artists. I also wrote about Russian art. Is it Western? Probably not. Is it non-Western? Probably not either. These distinctions are problematic. In Russia and after I left, I was interested in one type of work and wrote about artists who practiced it. I called it Conceptualist, though one could use many different names. These artists made work in which precisely these questions were problematized. What is Russianness? Is it Western? What is an artwork? Is it an ordinary thing, or something else? Is an artwork even a thing—a particular object—or perhaps a non-objective idea that can only be grasped through imagination? My friend Ilya Kabakov always suggested that his works contained a kind of nothingness, a blind spot, something invisible. Questions of what is Western or non-Western, art or non-art, should be problematized within the artworks themselves. If an artist simply says, “I am Russian, so I make Russian art,” the work may be good or bad, but it is not interesting to me. I am interested in the work of people who do not know how to answer these questions of identity.