25th September – 6th November 2008
curator: Zuzana Štefková
press release (pdf, 57 Kb)
opening photo-gallery
exhibition photo-gallery
project's website
The exhibition entitled umenimamrad.cz is a presentation of a concept of Silvie Milkova and a group of students from the department of photography of Faculty of Arts and Design of University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem. The project concerns (impossible)marketing and (il)legibility of contemporary visual art and aims at reaching audiences, that in their majority consider contemporary art as something unintelligible or elitist, by the simple language typical for advertising. This goal is also supported by means of an opening (pseudo)advertising promotion action taking place in the Prague shopping mall Paladium on September 25 at 6 pm. During this action the authors will offer their art as a great affordable commodity. The accompanying eccentric program will provide the opening show by a “catchy” image.
This project self-critically explores the impact of the (now popular) motto: “help yourself and God will help you” as applied in culture. As the protests organized by a part of the professional art scene directed against the cultural policy of the Municipality showed, it is not always easy to set absolute values of art and to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial art production. The project umenimamrad.cz poses a related question: How far can an artist go while promoting his or her “product”; and it spells it out by means of the language of commercials.
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