Acasă Articole RTR Profesioniști contra amatori: false narațiuni și mize politice despre „Cântarea României”
Profesioniști contra amatori: false narațiuni și mize politice despre „Cântarea României”
Rezumat
Professionals versus Amateurs: False Narratives and Political Stakes Around „Song of Romania” Festival
Abstract: Within the collective public memory of the Romanian cultural field, especially in the field of performative arts, two distinct policies introduced by the communist regime at the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s have been conflated into a single ideological plan intending to dismantle the professional artistic movement. The first such policy was founding the mass culture festival „Song of Romania” in 1976, which explicitly celebrated amateur art and popular creativity; the other policy was significantly cutting the subsidies received by cultural (professional) institutions, which were thus forced into a so-called self-financing system starting in 1981–1984. The general – but, as the present research shows, erroneous – belief that the regime was spending on amateurs the money the rest of the cultural field was lacking had the effect of a total rejection of everything that was not high art, including non-professional initiatives with previously proven experimental, counter-cultural, or politically critical bona fide. The self-gratifying narrative of a high culture that presented such a political menace that the regime wanted it destroyed missed, in fact, the underlying rationale for Ceaușescu’s inventing of the „Song of Romania” Festival: the search for a locally made form of mass entertainment to replace the ever-expanding access of the youth to Western pop culture.
Keywords: self-financing, Ceausescu, mass culture, alternative art.
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