Foundation strategy

The foundation is not based on any particular idea of an artist or a composer, but aims at the provision of conditions for emergence of cultural innovations.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, art and science revealed the unknown, invisible to the living beings — the hidden, but the world has now reached such a point that there is practically nothing to reveal: the hidden has become identical to given certainty. This is the specificity of the modern day: there is no dilemma of the hidden and the given in it. Everything is given certainty now. Therefore, in the context of the anthropological challenge that we see nowadays, art cannot appeal to the idea itself.

The concept of "cultural stock" based on considerations of objective foundation strategies comes in place of the illusions arising from subjective artistic intentions. Focusing on these strategies is what will actually help to avoid the occurrence of "one-day" phenomena in culture. The times when an artist is able to raise funds for a specific project are moving to the past. A reasonable concentration of capital is what goes to the fore when it comes to the implementation of creative initiatives. Allocation holders and experts become the key figures in the "bill of sale" of cultural heritage for the future. The foundation strategy should be implemented in the trends of time with readiness to capture artistic ideas, but not to raise capital for subjective ideas. Raising capital for ideas is a characteristic of sponsorship.

And only the foundation strategy can provide a long-term "accumulation of cultural stock."
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"Disappearance of great modernists is not necessarily a cause for regret.

Our social order is more sophisticated in terms of information; it has a higher level of literacy; it is at least more democratic asocially,
more democratic in terms of the spread of wage labor.

This new order no longer needs charismatic prophets and dreamers of high modernism, be they culture makers or politicians. Such figures no longer have any magical effect on the subjects of the corporate, collectivized, and post-individualist era; in this case, one should say goodbye to them without any regrets, as Brecht might say: "Woe to the country that needs geniuses, prophets, great writers, or playwrights."

A step forward to understanding this
"Is made thanks to the understanding that the names that used to be great are no longer deemed heroes who do not fit into our reality, but serve as examples of careers, objective situations when an ambitious young artist living at the beginning of the century could see an objective opportunity to become the greatest artist (or poet, novelist, composer) of their time. This objective opportunity is now given not thanks to one's personal talent as such, not by virtue of some spiritual wealth or inspiration, but rather thanks to strategies of an almost military nature, based on technical or territorial superiority, skillful maximization of one's specific resources. I think we still admire great generals as well as their vis-a-vis (great artists). This admiration is directed, however, not at internal subjectivity, but at their historical sense, the ability to assess the current situation, and to immediately determine a possible system of its transformations."
Fredric Jameson, American literary critic, Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies, Duke University
It is no longer possible to be Mozart by inward impulses. Therefore, the task of the foundation strategy should be to anticipate and capture the needs of the time so that a "new Mozart" could really appear. The foundation's task is to force the appearance of "Mozarts" and "Hildegards."

There is an urgent need for endowment foundations in the world of music. It is a matter of life and death for composers and their art.

The foundation does not solve issues arisen by any particular idea, but the issue of creating conditions for emergence of ideas.

Almost everything in the modern cultural industry depends on success. However, this success does not always imply quality. Thus, we can see nowadays that a huge number of artistic works bring success to their authors, but they lack quality.

Indeed, the majority of successful projects are presented as media projects. Serving for amusement, for artistic consumption, they are more likely to be referred to the service industry, but not to cultural phenomena.
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"In order to feel ourselves confident and defend ourselves from misfortunes that this world may throw us to, we should no longer rely on the forms of thinking, conclusions, discourses that have their own niche, in one particular context or another. A group of fans, a religious community, a party cell, a place of work — all these places, of course, continue to exist, but none of them is sufficiently characteristic and characterizing to provide us with a "wind rose" or a lighthouse to orient at, a reliable compass, a set of certain habits, certain ways of creative thinking. Ethical and rhetorical typography is disappearing. Commonly attended places, meager foundations for the life of the mind, come to the fore. Only these places provide a criterion for orientation, and thus, for some common course of things.

Sometimes we hear about the infantilism of modern urban population. It would make sense to ask if there are any grounds for comparing urban life and childhood.

A child uses repetition as a protection mechanism (fairy tales, games, and gestures are repeated over and over again). And repetition should be understood as a defensive strategy in relation to shocks caused by the new and the unexpected.

In traditional societies or in people's experience, the repetition so loved by children has given way to more articulated and complex forms of protection, namely, to the ethos: morals, customs and habits that form the basis of sustainable communities. Now this replacement is no longer possible. Repetition prevails, and there is nothing left to substitute it with.

Walter Benjamin caught this moment and paid great attention to childhood, children's play, and love for repetitions. At the same time he traced the technical reproducibility of a work of art as a point at which new forms of perception are nurtured. The desire for repetition is revived in technical reproducibility even more intensely. More precisely, we see the need for a repeated action as a protection mechanism, again. Indeed, there is something infantile in modern society, but this "something" is incredibly serious."
Paolo Virno (b. 1952), an Italian Marxist philosopher, a semiologist, and a political theorist
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Ekaterina Holm
Director
+7 (985) 233-72-20
ekaterina@the-fund.ru