Look at her nails," says Vitaly Komar, gently patting the marble hands of the statue on the bank of the artificial lake next to Bellagio. Las Vegas tourists rush by us, ready to lose everything, indifferent to the partially clad marble maiden. "What''s so great about her? She isn''t even a fountain."

"This is how you distinguish the real thing from the fake. Judging by the nails, it''s a masterpiece!" insists Komar. What does the master of sotsartistic reproduction mean by the "real thing"? That little crack on her nail, the sculpted wrinkle on the index finger? The statue was a copy of course, like everything else in Las Vegas, but not a mass-reproduced one. It was a sixteenth century remake of the Roman original, a masterpiece of late-renaissance artisanship, a manual labor of love, not a modern reproduction.

Paradoxical as it may seem for Russian-American artists, "Art" in whatever quotation marks and frames is still linked to that low-tech, time-consuming artisan labor. Postmodern awareness goes together with anachronistic love for the old-fashioned European craft of painting. In the Soviet times, the academic tradition was desperately passed on from generation to generation of art students in lieu of the history of the twentieth century art that was heavily censored. At the conference, the Russian artists discussed pop art that questions the romantic idea of originality, genius and authorship and at the same time spoke about the "Hamburg score" the artistic equivalent to the "last judgment that reaffirms traditional values of artistic authorship.

In their project "People''s Choice," Komar and Melamid didn''t follow the "Hamburg score," but rather let themselves be guided by the people''s taste as measured by the scientific polls. They dutifully painted the "most wanted" painting of all the polled nations that resembled a total cereal; it had all the ingredients that people desired: the blue landscape, the figure of a religious leader, children at work or at leisure (Russians prefer the latter, Americans, the former), partially-clad humans (less clad in France, more in the US), wild and domestic animals (rhinoceroses in Kenya, bears in Russia). Yet the painting remained conspicuously incongruent. No one''s gazes met and everyone seemed to exist in their own disjointed time and space.

"I hope that when people look at those paintings, they will realize how awful they are and maybe will change their minds," commented Komar (check quote). "Most wanted," after all, are usually fugitives. Once captured, they are no longer wanted but subject to imprisonment. The most wanted painting that followed the people''s choice, fulfilling simultaneously the demands of socialist realism and of the market art, ended up being a painting that nobody wanted.

It seems that the most scientific and American project of the two ex-Soviet artists presents, against all odds, a defense of aesthetics--via negativa. Only Russian-American artists can end up as apostles and salesmen of the world''s forgotten religion--Art.

"One could be an intelligent person, and think about the beauty of the nails," wrote Pushkin. Only then it was a sign of modernity and now it has become an anachronism, maybe a necessary one.

Shadow Economy: Art and Money

Grisha Bruskin remembered a strange story that happened to him sometime at the dawn of perestroika in 1988. Rumors circulated around Moscow that Bruskin''s paintings were sold at Sotheby''s auction for some fifty thousand dollars. For a Soviet artist, a dollar was mythical rather than real money, a subject of Andy Warhol''s painting, convertible into art, not into rubles. Returning home with his wife Alesia, Grisha found five rubles on the road. "Should I pick it up?" he wondered. My painting might have sold for fifty thousand dollars. At the end he did, because five rubles seemed more like real money transferable into Soviet daily life. Besides, one doesn''t find five rubles on the road everyday. It''s a sign of luck.

It seems that Soviet/Russian/Post-Soviet culture always operated through multiple economies that ran parallel to one another. Their currencies became more convertible in the last ten years, but not entirely so. Is twentieth-century Russian art convertible into the Western canon if their institutional histories are so strikingly different? Western art operated in the market society with the developed history of the museum of modern art as an institution, while Russian/Soviet art was state sponsored and collective, characteristics that shaped its history. In other words, Russian Soviet art existed in an anachronistic space of privilege and oppression, in the realm of state patronage on the one hand, and in the unofficial principality where art was a second government ruled by a politburo of officially unrecognized geniuses.

Indeed, the formative economic influences of my childhood (which are mostly likely shared by others) were, on the one hand, the songs that bashed money-making and on the other hand, the romances with the black-marketers, who speculated on jeans and dublenki, cheating on thirsty Finnish tourists.

-- Would you like to have a million?
-- No!
-- Would you like to go to the Moon?
-- Yes!


Mikhail Epstein wrote that Soviet money was more beautiful than American because it doesn''t represent "dry numbers but bitter and joyful words" for which "one doesn''t buy products [tovary] but precious and priceless comrades [tovarishchi]." This was well summarized in the popular bard''s song about priceless and precious fog: "Some people travel on business. Some people looking for money, escaping from boredom and debt, but I am going to search for the fog, just for the fog, for the fog and the smell of taiga."

In the 1960s searching for the fog, just for the fog, was more culturally acceptable than looking for financial awards and self-interest. We thought we''d go to Siberia or to the Moon before we''d go abroad. Instead of marrying a millionaire, we wanted to marry a cosmonaut, or at least a geologist. Art had more to do with the fog and the Moon than with the money. Or so it seemed.

Katia Dyogot insists on the difference between collective Soviet experience and individualistic market existence of the Western artist. In my view, this opposition doesn''t quite hold true. In fact, high contemporary art in the West existed largely on government subsidies (heavily so in Western Europe) and in the case of modern art, its market value, so to speak, was determined precisely by its ability to defy the market tastes as well as the values of traditional art. It first became a museum art, not strictly speaking a free-market art.

The artist exists on subsidies and grants, on all those remnants of the welfare state that survives in Western Europe to a larger degree than in Russia. In Russia at the beginning of perestroika the Sotheby''s auction suddenly endowed the unofficial art with a spectacular market value, providing a short-lived shock therapy to the artistic community. This was, however, highly unusual, and remained so, leaving behind the same absence of institutions of modern and contemporary art in Russia as well as the local art market.

Russian-American artists in America survive as Western artists, working from project to project. "But all their art is anti-capitalist," says Natasha Ivanova, suggesting that the artists, once Russian, remain so forever.

Yet this "anti-capitalism" (or rather a subtle play with and against the market and artistic institutions) characterizes most of contemporary art--East and West. It is as global (or rather what I would call "glocal") a phenomenon as free trade. In fact, there are plenty of inversions there, often former socialist artists appear to the institutionalized contemporary artists from the "West" as more money-oriented, while the Western artists appear to the Russians to be living comfortably on social welfare.

Katia Dyogot suggested that while Andy Warhol took time mass-producing the silk screens of his dollar signs, the post-Soviet artist Alexander Brener performed a more radical gesture by simply painting a dollar sign on Malevich''s original in the Stejdlik Museum.

In my view, the belated "actionism" of Alexander Brener is precisely a "glocal" phenomenon of Russian-Western cultural exchange. In fact, at the time he perpetrated his act, Brener was in Holland on a fellowship that gave him enough money to live in Amsterdam, work and visit museums where he could take his liberties. In that respect he was already a "Western artist" on a fellowship.

Brener performed his desecration; nobody was present in the room to witness his "actionism," only Malevich might have turned in his supremacist coffin. Brener had to go call the guard and explain to him what he had done. In fact, Brener''s search for radicalism lost proves, in my view, that the border between Russian and Western body politic and art has been slowly blurred. This was a counterfeit radicalism, which still presumed that art, power and money are closely linked together in the mythical Western culture. That is not quite so. While Russian avant-garde sells well on the art market, Malevich''s black square is hardly an icon of power--maybe only in the ex-Soviet imagination. "Signing" Malevich was a gesture of appropriation, painting a dollar sign a virtual purchase. Brener too, wanted to be--or at least to own--Malevich, but at a discount price, with counterfeit money.

In any case, Art always deals in counterfeits, whether they are dollars, rubles or metaphors. In both Russia and America, representation and desecration of money is a misdemeanor, but for different reasons. In America, it is so because money is seen as sacred; in Russia, it is so because money is supposed to be sacred in America.

Recent Russian cinema resolves financial problems by non-economic means. The character of Sergei Bodrov, the charismatic and "fair" Mafioso catches the evil American corporate executive and puts a gun to his head. Before blowing out his brains he gives the American a little didactic lesson Russian-style. "You think only the money matters? No, what matters is the truth [pravda]." Having said that, he shoots him. The only problem is that the hero does it slavishly, following the conventions of Hollywood Mafia films. It''s not the economy, stupid.

Somehow scholars from Russia focused on the difference between Russia and the West. But how far can one go without converting one''s currency? What''s the price of the verbal devaluation of foreign finances? Doesn''t it lead to excessive valorization of the stereotypes that present the "West" as much more homogenous than it is? Wouldn''t it be better to reinvent a different kind of free trade, another "unofficial" globalization that deals in "beautiful money," to quote Mikhail Epstein? It''s all a gamble, anyway.

The most radical confession at the conference was made by the artist Leonid Pinchevsky. He told us that unlike the other artists present at the conference, he paints for money. In fact, it was he who did the ceiling paintings in Bellagio and The Venetian, and his signature is nowhere to be found. He is proud of his Titian imitations. He traded his authorship for money. He is only a craftsman, not a creator. At least not in this project. That might be the most radical conceptual gesture of which a former Russian artist is capable.

Yet in the festival, Pinchevsky''s works presented dream-rooms of his provincial Soviet Jewish childhood filled with sentimental kitsch and Western objects of desire. The artist chose not to choose between his two alter egos: that of the ex-Soviet unofficial artist and the successful decorator of Venice, Las Vegas. It is the artist''s anxiety that betrayed his roots. No American artist would have worried so much about impersonating a Venetian painter who worked on commission.

If we were to make a Las Vegas quilt of memories, we would have to clip Bruskin''s five rubles, like Nabokov''s butterfly, to the Venetian clouds


Art and Soul-trade: Russian-American Artist as a Repo Man
The first American project of Komar and Melamid was entitled, We buy and sell souls. Its logo was an apple flying over Manhattan with a snake biting through it--an allusion to New York''s Eden and the Tree of Knowledge. The artists tried to outsmart the devil himself, turning the Faustian bargain into a corporate enterprise. "Bring us your tired souls yearning to be free," proclaimed one of the ads. Is this a critique of world capitalism that allows you to buy and sell everything sacred, or is it the archcaptialist experiment in its own right?

Besides the traditional role of Mephistopheles the tempter, the ��migr�� artist also appropriates the strategy of an American repo man who repossesses public spaces where art once existed back into the realm of art, trespassing into the sphere of the "sacred" and profane, mixing advertisement and religion.

The project of buying and selling souls had another poetic dimension. It was not only about purchase but also about a curious transmigration. The certificate for the purchase of souls was smuggled to the Soviet Union in 1979 (one of the smugglers was the head of the Slavic division of Harvard University Library) and a secret auction was held near Moscow that became a kind of unofficial performance-art event that took place in the absence of the artists. The material documentation of the transaction of soul-purchase and the photographs of the auction became of great importance in their own right.

The soul of Andy Warhol was purchased for about fifty rubles--one third of the monthly engineer salary, which was not at all cheap. For Komar and Melamid, the project became a part of their experiment with what they called a "transstate" [transgosudarstvo], which would accommodate all resident and non-resident aliens of the world, whose territory would be virtual and whose bureaucratic paperwork will be designed by K and M. So in the end, buying and selling souls was not merely about American all-embracing consumerism or Russian spirituality (or Soviet collective ideology and the freedom of American individual entrepreneurship) but also about investing in the unreal estate of the "trans-country" of the immigrant imagination.

A moving emotional reunion took place during the conference in Las Vegas. The woman who purchased Andy Warhol''s soul reminisced with tears in her eyes in front of the blurry black-and-white photograph. Twenty years ago she spent what was the equivalent of half of the monthly salary of an engineer. Living with the soul of the pop-king did her wonders. She believes that his uncanny presence persuaded her to come to America. So art does transmigrate into life, after all, sometimes surprising pop and sots artists themselves.

Amerossia

How can we locate the borders between Russia and America in the works of the artists? I observed that Komar and Melamid, Sokov, Lemm and Kosolapov use the same device in their work, something that can be called a mock collage or a ghost border-crossing


Komar and Melamid''s Double Self-Portrait presents a portrait of the artists as young pioneers saluting the father of the people, Stalin. Only the aging faces of the artists betray the fact that this is "nostalgic socialist realism," not the actual one. (So does the technique. It''s too good to be true.) The line of mock collage goes straight through the neck of the artist, like an invisible guillotine. In Alexander Kosolapov''s It''s the Real Thing, which couples Lenin and Coca-Cola, the border is erased in the shared red background. The tension between two mass-reproduced symbols exists precisely because there is no pictorial tension there, no seam, no cut. Rather than a collage, this is more of a surrealist chance encounter, a bizarre and striking juxtaposition that presents itself as a hyper-continuity. Artist as a repo man becomes a "passportless" spy who crosses the border between different symbolic orders.

It was Nabokov who discovered "Amerossia," an imaginary land, crisscrossed by the passportless spies and artists from both sides. In the poem to Kachurin, the lyrical narrator imagines returning to Russia with another one of his false passports, disguised as an American priest:

I want to go home. I''ve had enough.
Kachurin, may I go home?
To the pampas of my free youth,
To the Texas I once discovered.


So what is the referent of the word "home"? The ex-Russian disguised as an American seems to be returning to his homeland, yet he begs to go back into exile. More precisely, home means neither Russia nor the United States, but rather that imaginary America that the writer inhabited during his Russian youth while reading the work of forgotten American writer Captain Maine Reid. Two spaces, Russia and America, are linked in a kind of M��bius strip of the writer''s imagination. Similarly there is a utopian mirroring of two countries, each of which seems to see in the other the limit of its own fantasies