Las Vegas Festival Explores Post-Soviet Culture and Cold War Art Exchanges

Dmitri Shalin has organized bi-annual festivals dedicated to post-Soviet culture in Las Vegas since 1996. The 2000 event, titled Cold War, Hot Culture, took place November 19-22 at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino. Participants included artists, scholars, and cultural figures like Vladimir Paperny, Svetlana Boym, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, and John Bowlt. Discussions centered on unofficial Soviet art movements like Sots-art, the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, and CIA funding of Abstract Expressionism. Jack Masey, designer of that 1959 exhibition, presented slides showing how American capitalism was promoted through consumer goods and Jackson Pollock paintings. The festival featured doodle collections by attendees and examined themes like art market conversions, with Grisha Bruskin recalling his Sotheby's auction experience. Alexander Brener's defacement of Malevich's Black Square in Amsterdam was debated as a glocal artistic gesture. Leonid Pinchevsky confessed to painting for money, creating ceiling works at Bellagio and The Venetian. Komar and Melamid's project 'We buy and sell souls' involved a secret 1979 auction near Moscow where Andy Warhol's soul was purchased for fifty rubles. The gathering highlighted tensions between Russian and American artistic identities, with nostalgic reflections on Soviet-era unofficial art networks.