Anatol Rykov (St. Petersburg): Censorship and Global Art Theory

There are numerous reasons to assume that censorship has to become one of the central categories of the future art studies. The problems of style as a collective unconscious or individualistic expression should be reformulated into the questions of fashion, rivalry, censorship and social mimicry. Since the very beginnings of scientific art theory different conceptions (more pragmatic or more idealistic) struggled for the adequate version of censorship. It became a question of polemics between the Vienna and St. Petersburg’s schools of art criticism but the arguments of the Russian scholars were reintroduced much later by Ernst Gombrich during the Cold War period in London. Of course the Russian theorists of the pre-revolutionary period were greatly impressed and scared by the populist movements of their time that finally became part of Bolshevik mythology. They compared these processes with an ideology of “political correctness” of late Antiquity that introduced the special ideals of moralizing, intolerance and collectivism into different spheres of social life.
Although St. Petersburg scientists and their Vienna colleagues equally focused on the problems of late Roman Empire and the dramatic processes of transition from the sophisticated culture of Classical Antiquity to the barbarism of the early middle ages, it is possible to say that, for instance, Nikodim Kondakov’s or Michael Rostovtzeff’s approaches were far less “romantic” or “expressionistic” than Max Dvorak’s or even Alois Riegl’s conceptions. Rostovtzeff or Fedor Schmit interpreted the culture of the Roman Empire as a complex process of interrelations between the minority cultures, their proto-socialist ideologies and the dominant discourses. Is it possible to interpret these diverse ideologies as an analog of contemporary “political correctness” or this identification on the contrary is an ahistorical aberration?