A seguito della nomina respinta dell'artista Pyotr Pavlensky il Top Art Prize Russo, sponsorizzato dalo stato, è stato annullato dagli organizzatori, notizia diffusa oggi da Artnet.
Russia's top art prize, the state-sponsored Innovatsiya (Innovation) Prize, has been canceled by the organizers after the nomination of political dissident performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky has been rejected.
According to The Art Newspaper, the artist has been nominated in the visual art category for the performance piece Threat: Lubyanka's Burning Door, which saw him setting fire to the entrance of the Federal Security Service (FSB—the successor of the KGB) building in Moscow in November 2015.
AFP reports that art critic Anna Tolstova, who's on the award's advisory board, received Pavlensky's approval before nominating his performance, and that the work has in fact garnered most votes from jury members.
But the nomination didn't sit right with the award organizers, the state-run National Centre for Contemporary Arts. The center's director Mikhail Mindlin has released a statement explaining that Pavlensky's nomination has been rejected as it involved "breaches of the law and caused material damage."
He added that nominating this performance "to a competition which is held by a state organisation and under the aegis and with the support of the culture ministry seems impermissible to us."
Pavlenky's removal from the shortlist, in turn, led to sweeping walkouts from the selection committee, with Dimitri Ozverkov, the head of the contemporary art department at St Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum, among the eight curators and critics to have withdrawn. Half of the committee then agreed to return on the condition that the art category be called off entirely... article
