We continue on the topic of Values and Meanings in the Development of Regional Culture. TSU Rector Eduard Galazhinskiy and Director of the Pushkin Museum Elizaveta Likhacheva participated in the discussion.
– Professor Galazhinkiy, why should scientists visit museums of fine arts, unless, of course, they contain collections of artifacts that are the subject of their particular scientific interest?
– Such museums, just like nature, are sources of deep inspiration and scientists need it no less than artists. In order to create something unique, they must reflect on and see the world around them outside the box. As a result of their reflection and observation, their scientific discoveries and artistic works become “gold standards” for others and turn into technologies. Therefore, for me, any real museum of fine arts is a collection of not only “gold standards”, but also examples of non-stereotypical thinking and original, author’s pictures of the world. Unfortunately, it is not possible to visit museums as often as we would like, but each visit becomes an event and is remembered for a long time. And the main thing is that such visits give us fresh thoughts and a desire to work with renewed vigor! One of these events for me was the exhibition “Strange Convergences Happen,” which took place at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in January and February last year. The organizers said that at first, they wanted to call it “The Ancients Stole All Our Ideas,” but then they settled on Pushkin’s line. The main goal of the exhibition was to compare works of various genres and eras in order to encourage the viewer to find what unites them: some kind of common “rhyme” based on form, color, plot or something else. Sometimes these were individual details that were visible in works not only fr om different eras, but also fr om different cultures and civilizations. Such unexpected parallels in art also evoke unexpected associations with one’s own work.
Elizaveta Likhacheva (addressing the audience of the TOM Festival):
– Why do you come to the museum? It is believed that the world's first museum (subsequently the Capitoline Museums) was opened in the mid-16th century in Rome and was a collection of antiques of the Roman popes in the newly built public building of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on Capitoline Hill. A little later, another public palace, Palazzo Nuovo, appeared. But in an amicable way, the Palazzo dei Conservatori never fulfilled the functions for which it was intended. In fact, it was an open collection of sculptures, of which the popes always had a lot. But how is a museum different fr om collections? It is all about availability. A private collection is not available. Lo and behold, museums have been multiplying for almost 500 years. Most museums are based on private collections. For example, the Hermitage was first the collection of Catherine the Great, and then Nicholas I. This was their taste. Catherine had a very diverse taste. For example, she was the first in Russia to begin collecting architectural graphics. For her, the prince and philanthropist, Nikolai Yusupov, collected art objects and bought albums by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. And Catherine accidentally bought a Michelangelo. Thus, in Russia there is a genuine piece by Michelangelo, which is beyond doubt. It is the marble sculpture “Crouching Boy” in the Hermitage. The Hermitage collection is absolutely outstanding. The Pushkin Museum has never been based, to such an extent, on private collections. Although, of course, the most important components of the Pushkin Museum is made up of a collection of Moscow merchants Shchukin and Morozov. It is an outstanding collection of French impressionist artists, thanks to which the Pushkin Museum was included in the list of the world's most important museums of modern art.
No less significant is the function of the museum for the study of art. As a rule, this work is completely invisible to its visitors. Sometimes the result of such work is “only” a change in the label. Imagine digging for 30 years just to change the label and entry in the inventory ledger! This is not the “science of discovery” that we are all accustomed to. This is not the science of Indiana Jones, who, wearing a hat, digs up some magical artifacts and hides them in some magical warehouse in Nevada.
It turns out that over time, the museum suddenly, unexpectedly, turns into the space that a person needs in order to reflect on the world around him. Art is the highest degree of human's emotional reflection! With the Department of Anthropology at TSU, we could at least think about this. In general, Homo sapiens appeared at the moment when a person looked into the surface of the water and realized that it was him, and not someone else. When a cat looks in the mirror, it sees another cat. But we see ourselves in the mirror. This is the story of how the image appears during the period when the Cro-Magnons - people of the Stone Age - gradually become modern people. Then wall or cave painting appears. And this aspect of introducing ancient people to art as satisfying their basic needs is extremely important. The university is here despite the fact that knowledge has always existed, although science as such was formed only in the Age of Enlightenment. In the first half of the 18th century, there lived in Germany a man named Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who became the first art critic in history. Using the method of describing the analysis of monuments, he reconstructed the emergence of order architecture and wrote a book about it. Now we know that he was mistaken here and there, but nevertheless, he created a science - art history. As a result, museums changed from places wh ere people satisfied their aesthetic needs to places wh ere people began to study art in an attempt to understand themselves.
How does the human brain work? Why do we like some things and not others? Why do we consider Raphael Santi a genius, but not another artist? How is the image arranged? All this should be studied at an interdisciplinary level. To understand the structure of a picture, you need to understand the structure of the human eye. Understanding how colors interact requires knowledge of the color spectrum. Without this you will not understand paintings. That is why at some point art history turns into an interdisciplinary field. And the museum is the place wh ere specialists study all this when working with original artifacts. Of course, we are interested in being helped. Because no one masters both art and physics well at the same time. Although, of course, according to legend there was a poet Valery Bryusov who could give a lecture on any topic. He sat down, prepared for half an hour and - voilà! But there are very few such people. Therefore, cooperation with educational and scientific institutions for us is not just a confirmation of our university origins, it is also ensuring the further development of museum work, which has many different aspects. This also includes organizing logistics within the exhibition. This is a search for a new language to communicate. These are technologies that we introduce into our museum work. For example, non-invasive archaeology. Previously, to understand, for example, the alloy of an ancient axe, it was necessary to drill a hole in it to take a sample, which is the loss of the object. Now, thanks to science, we can, without drilling such an axe, study it using a spectrometer. Why is communication with universities still important for us? At a university, a person can gain knowledge fr om any field of activity. It seems to me that one way to keep the country in the state it is now is to form a unified intellectual environment. I believe that the museum is one of those places that shapes this environment. This is why we attach such great importance to communication with universities and cooperation with them. Intelligence saved humanity throughout the 20th century. Forming an intellectual environment for the Pushkin Museum is one of its main goals!
(Fr om the transcript of the speech)
–Elizaveta said a lot of interesting things at the opening of the TOM Festival. But what did you think was the most important?
– I would once again emphasize how important it is for people to look in the “mirror” and see themselves from the outside. And the whole range of opportunities that culture and art give people is critically important for the university. I remember that we, the rectors, came to defend the 5–100 Project in 2013, and German Gref, a big fan of the market and a member of the commission, asked us all: “Who is your client?” Then it flashed through my head: “What client? We are a university!” We were all shocked. And he said: “You don’t know who your client is? That's it, get out of here. We are removing you from the run." We were all very confused then, since we had never thought in such categories. We started from the idea of education as a public good for present and future generations. But then this idea faded into the background and became irrelevant. It is clear that there must also be market contexts. But back then they attacked very quickly and aggressively. The replacement of education with “service” was launched. Topics related to hard skills, soft skills and the like began to appear. But at the same time, the topic of self-development of a person was completely missed and most importantly, professionalism and the ability to work in a team. It seemed to many that all those were part of everything implicitly. But if the depth of personality is not formed, there are no values, no content, no maturity. If a person is not able to manage potential, living without “coming to consciousness,” then do we need such a person as the one who should take responsibility for the future of the country? This topic is key for us. And we immediately entered this “self” story into the graduate’s model, and we worked and are working with this reality purposefully. We believe that only at the university does the true development of humanity take place in a person. And through the tools of working with this potential, we teach students to be conscious “users” of themselves; those who create the best version of themselves every day through education, science and culture.
Elizaveta Likhacheva:
– We went through this too. We also provided cultural “services”. It took me quite a long time to beat this idea out of my colleagues at the museums in which I worked. Because we don't provide services. They are provided somewhere else. The museum provides a great benefit. The museum is a great invention of Western Christian civilization. Before this, there were no museums as such anywhere. This is a purely European “trick”, which eventually became global. So are universities. [...] It seems to me that intelligence cannot exist strictly within the framework of one discipline. [...] It so happens that I am periodically invited to educational institutions involved in technical and natural sciences - to the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, for example, or to the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University. There I regularly encounter the position of young people, which is best manifested in the character of a famous television series The Big Bang Theory. I am referring to theoretical physicist Dr. Sheldon Lee Cooper, who is absolutely sure that the humanities are engaged in all sorts of nonsense, but natural and exact science is a completely different matter.
First: I am sure that there are no totally exact sciences. Any science is an area of speculation. If science does not have this area, then it is not science, but faith, that is, religion. If there is no area of hypotheses and “nowhere” to fantasize, then this is not science. Accordingly, there are no exact sciences. And the humanities in this regard are no different from the natural sciences. [...] The same phenomenon was explained differently at different times. For example, the ancient Greeks believed that lightning was Zeus, who spoke to them like that. But in the 17th century they no longer thought so and argued that this was a physical phenomenon. So, there are no exact sciences. But there are methods of scientific knowledge and methods of non-scientific knowledge. The museum sphere also has its own methodology of scientific knowledge: And in art history, of course, too. [...] Students sometimes ask why they should study something if it will never be useful to them in real life. How do you know WHAT exactly you will need in life? Have you seen your life to death? If you refuse some knowledge, you deprive yourself of access to a life-giving source. Yes, at some point you will understand that not every knowledge needs to be made “yours.” But in order to understand that, you need to already know quite a lot. To understand wh ere they give you real knowledge, you need to have some experience, including the experience of the process of acquiring knowledge.
Second: I believe that there are no “humanists” and “technical specialists”, but there are people who are educated and those who are not. If a humanist has never heard of Kepler, then they are not a humanist, just a person who did not receive a normal education. Accordingly, if a techie is not interested in Raphael, then he or she is simply lying. I have never met people in my life who were not interested in Raphael. It’s just that sometimes this interest is expressed not directly in the painting of Raphael Santi, but, for example, indirectly as in interest in comics or cinema as forms of art, in some other manifestations - rock music or something else.
But the moment came when they tried to move museums into the entertainment sector, and universities into the service sector. And this is wh ere it became obvious how important art education is. And it is not only the ability to draw, although it will not hurt anyone either. In the classical gymnasium education system and the Soviet school, we were always taught to draw. It is necessary to understand WHAT you see and HOW it works. The ability to comprehend art is the most important factor in the educational process. But by the mid-1990s, museums were stripped of their status as scientific organizations. Really, what kind of science can there be? They store something there. There are no scientific publications! The Higher Attestation Commission does not give you assignments. And now, thank God, something happened in their brain. I think that my generation has simply grown up, those who are now between 40 and 55 years old. The generation that saw the last years of Soviet power and was formed in the 1990s, we, as its representatives, suddenly realized that with such a strictly “technical” approach, when education is a “service” and the museum is “entertainment,” we clearly missed something. We missed the main thing — the cultural and educational environment. Therefore, now the unification of museums and educational institutions to recreate such an environment is not just a trend, but a necessity!
(From the transcript of the speech)
– Eduard Vladimirovich, the question arises: can the cultural and educational environment created and supported by universities and museums compete with the digital environment? Are modern youth able to appreciate the advantages of the former and not completely drown in the latter? Does the youth need museums if they are “not for fun”?
– Actually, there is nothing wrong with it if young people first go to museums “to have fun” or just “for company,” because no one knows when their Meeting with the Beautiful with a capital “B” will take place. It doesn’t matter for what reason they go there, because regardless of this, something can happen there that will change both the person and the surrounding world. Probably, many people have come across very similar statements from different people, when they say “modern youth are no good” and “where is the world heading?” The task was to guess who these statements belong to. And it turned out that the historian Hesiod (8th century BC); the philosopher Socrates (5th century BC); and the writer Heinrich Böll (20th century) have all shared these sentiments. But, the feeling is that all these people lived at the same time and were talking about the same generation! In general, they have always been dissatisfied with young people. But, as you know, youth is a disadvantage that passes rather quickly.
“I have lost all hope for the future of our country if the youth of today takes the reins of power tomorrow, for these youth are unbearable, uncontrollable, simply terrible” (Hesiod).
“Our youth love luxury, they are poorly educated, they mock their superiors and have no respect for the elderly. Our current children have become tyrants; they do not stand up when an elderly person enters the room; they contradict their parents. Simply put, they are very bad” (Socrates).
“It must be said that the current younger generation is no good, and if ever there was a generation that was good anywhere — which I personally very much doubt - it was the generation of our fathers” (Heinrich Böll).
Here it must be said that, in principle, there are not so many people among all generations who are ready to go deeper into their profession, learn to understand themselves and life around them, work with their potential, and so on. Maslow believed that there are only about 3% of them. Modern research shows that such people represent approximately 15% of the population in different societies. Most people live without regaining consciousness, as one of the philosophers said. Psychologist Dmitry Leontiev proposed the metaphor of a person whose outline has been drawn and comes to consciousness only when something happens in his or her life. For example, some kind of tragedy or non-trivial event. Before that, they live in an altered state, say, in a phone or computer. From this point of view, our task is to bring these people out of their “waking dream” through a bright event, such as, for example, the TOM Festival, a book exhibition, a concert, an interesting lecture or discussion. Perhaps even through the obligatory nature of visiting them. For example, all first-year students should attend university events at the beginning of the academic year, if only to get to know each other, teachers, and university traditions, understanding that it’s all here. Our task is to ensure this first bright meeting and contact with beauty through different formats, including through reading a book. This is why reading great books is built into the core of our undergraduate education. At TSU, there is the Open University project that has a very interesting experience of holding literary marathons. For example, several years ago, we had a reading of “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Gambler” by Dostoevsky.
We expect that this unusual format and a bright event for our students and professors will become a course of 25 lectures on art, which the director of the Pushkin Museum, Elizaveta Likhacheva, kindly agreed to record for us. And it seems to me that we must continue such dialogues. Our communication with the museum staff during the TOM Festival showed that we really have a lot in common. We look from different sides, but at the same very important and essential things. Representing various departments — the Ministry of Science and Education and the Ministry of Culture, Tomsk State University and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts together can create a kind of “interdepartmental agency” for aesthetic education and youth education, which is extremely relevant, but, as life shows, a very difficult task. Thus, together with the museum, we could develop an educational model that is innovative for the country, in which the institution of the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Culture, combining their potentials, would create a complementary history, when, relatively speaking, the sum of “two plus two” does not equal four, but immediately increases exponentially.
Returning to the TOM Festival, I would like to note that despite all the richness of its program, we have not had enough time to discuss much. For example, how beauty influences the process of cognition and the formation of a person. And what is beauty anyway? What are its criteria in our time? Once upon a time, the characters of Plato’s dialogues, the philosopher Socrates and the sophist Hippias of Elis, tried to answer these questions. In the 19th century, Nikolai Chernyshevsky posed them in his dissertation “Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality.” Let us also hold the next dialogue between scientists and artists on the topic of beauty. Let's not forget that only beauty can save the world.
Rector of TSU Eduard Galazhinsky,
Member of the Council for Science and Education under the President of the Russian Federation
The conversation was recorded by Irina Kuzheleva-Sagan