Orthodox Marxism Versus Modern Art. Setting: T o d a y. A lecture by Valery Podoroga 

This video is in Russian language.
The work of the Garage Field Research project If Our Soup Can Could Speak...Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties continues with a lecture from Kandinsky Prize-winning philosopher Valery Podoroga.
In his lecture, Podoroga aims to show the unique viewpoint from which critic and philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz was able to provide a consistent critique of modernist art. This lecture aims to breathe new life into the understanding of Marxism by analyzing it in from the viewpoint of its most orthodox follower-and one of its biggest influences.
Podoroga asks: “Was Mikhail Lifshitz an orthodox Marxist-Leninist, a secret ‘right-wing liberal,’ or a self-taught eclectic philosopher? The answer is hardly so important.” For Podoroga, the more interesting-and important-idea is how Lifshitz managed to provide a critique of modern art at all. Lifshitz, for his part, did not want to be a modernist, and subjected all modern art to the same standards of “ruthless critique.”
Lifshitz developed his own style of argumentation and was able to persuade peers with his incisiveness and subtlety. Such persuasion would be nigh impossible today, argues Podoroga, but Lifshitz was lucky in that he already occupied an anti-bourgeois, anti-Western place in socialism-he was already in the place that European culture would reach only slowly, after many difficult detours. In the end, there was no one but Lifshitz who was truly able to go against what was thought of as the “truth” of modern art.