Aleksy Wójtowicz
HISTORY OF ART FOR ONLY THE BRAINY CULTURE WARS AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN POLAND

rys. Aleksandra Herzyk

In November 2019, Mateusz Morawiecki, Prime Minister at the time, announced in his exposé that he would not allow a culture war to be triggered in Poland¹. However, the existence of a culture war or a post‑materialist conflict² of neoconservative origin, waged between two hostile systems of values had been diagnosed in Poland almost a decade earlier. As early as 2010, philosopher Leszek Koczanowicz suggested that the beginning of this social phenomenon in Poland dates back to 2005 and the emergence of “The IV RP” project in opposition to the Third Republic of Poland, in which political rivalry transforms into a full‑fledged cultural and ideological conflict³. He claimed that “it is no longer about two cultures within one nation, but rather about the coexistence of two nations with different values and aims”, The Genuine Poland v The Ingenuine Poland ⁴, describing this issue in line with James D. Hunter’s 1991 book, Culture Wars. The Struggle to Define America, which is fundamental for research on culture wars. According to Koczanowicz, in the Polish case, the conflict clearly intensified after 2010, along with social polarisation following the Smolensk disaster. For culture expert Wojciech J. Burszta, this event is the turning point in the Polish culture war⁵, while for Tomasz Mróz, it is only public debate after 2013 connected with the dispute over women’s reproductive rights, the role of the Church, and the subject of gender among others⁶ which is crucial. On the other hand, sociologist Michał Wróblewski and political scientist Marek Tyrała suggest that in Poland we have been dealing with culture wars since the early 1990s⁷, Tyrała even claims that they are immanently inscribed in the founding conflict of the Third Republic of Poland between post‑Solidarity and post‑communist circles⁸. In contrast to Koczanowicz’s view, which highlights 2005, Tyrała asserts that it is only one of the milestones in the long‑term evolution of this type of unresolvable axiological conflict and at the same time – a struggle for hegemony. In this approach, culture wars are, contrary to the assurances of Prime Minister Morawiecki, a permanent element of life in Poland, both political and social. According to the logic of culture wars, backlash “is presented as an exponent and defender of the interests of furious, oppressed common people, repulsed by the extravagances of omnipresent, raging liberalism”⁹, who target their frustration at the underprivileged, at those whose rights and subjectivity are undermined i.e. at women and various minorities. The term backlash, sometimes translated into Polish as “reaction”¹⁰, accurately describes this phenomenon – a counter‑offensive (or a counter‑revolution) of traditionalists against the achievements of the second and third waves of feminism and other emancipatory projects.

According to Sven Lütticken who described the similarities between the era of culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States and the current global situation, it is precisely contemporary culture and art that are treated in the perspective of culture wars as a clear manifestation of the degeneration of the liberal establishment¹¹. Therefore, from the perspective of Polish history and art criticism, culture war was recognised as an important factor which forms our society – and above all, our culture and its reception –much earlier than from the perspective of sociology or culture studies. As early as 2001, Zbigniew Libera was the initiator of an exhibition entitled Zimna Wojna sztuki ze społeczeństwem (Cold War between Art and Society), in response to negative reception of critical art (or, more broadly, non‑conservative contemporary art) in the local press. Poland’s joining the American hegemony impact zone after 1989, as well as opening up of the local art community to Western markets, naturally transplanted also this part of the conflict along with the specific language used by conservatives. Another reinforcing factor was the dispute over the identity and shape of Polish culture – called by Jakub Banasiak “the dispute about modernisation”¹² – in the face of the systemic transformation and the semi‑peripheral position of our post‑communist country. No less important is the conservative adaptation of the postcolonial theory, with its division into “The Genuine Poland” and ”Ingenuine Poland”. Stanley Bill develops this theme, saying that in this sense, the theory “provides a ready‑made tool for the implementation of the clearly conservative aim of defending exclusive and essentialist visions of authentic culture against universalist claims”¹³. Bill points out the conflict between conservative “natives” and the liberal establishment of “Creoles”¹⁴, where the nature of contemporary Polish culture is defined as “ingenuine”, i.e. hybrid and influenced by “culturally alien” patterns drawing on post‑communism¹⁵ and the European Union alike, presented as a “surrogate hegemon” of obviously communist provenance¹⁶.

As early as 2004, the magazine Zeszyty Artystyczne devoted an entire issue to the subject of culture wars – including a debate between the academic and curatorial communities, a text describing the American context of culture wars, and an analysis of the rhetoric of art criticism in the Polish high‑circulation press from the turn of the 21st century. In the debate published in Zeszyty…, Jarosław Suchan says that “Works […] are attacked not only because they treat sacred images in a way that is not sanctioned by the norm, but also because they are identified with contemporary art, something that our society, by definition, deeply distrusts – as a ‘foreign’ language” ¹⁷. The art historian also quotes a statement of the critic and curator Ewa Mikina “The crowd reacts with idiosyncrasies against the ‘initiated’, responds with violence, suspecting that a work of art can also be and is a form of violence, an authoritative imposition of indecipherable signs; another form of power, coercing contact with something that is alien to experience” ¹⁸. Paweł Leszkowicz’s well‑known text entitled Sztuka wobec rewolucji moralnej (Obieg, June 2005) also contained a similar diagnosis – the moral revolution of its title referred to plans of taking an even more conservative course in the political field. Although the essay preceded the victory of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party in the local elections by several months – and it is in this context that it is currently perceived: as a reaction to the first PiS government – it actually summed up previous experiences related to for instance the trial of Dorota Nieznalska for allegedly offending religious feelings, the consequences of exhibiting Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture in Zachęta – National Gallery of Art or media and political attacks by Catholic and conservative circles on works of art. However, in contrast to the tone of Zeszyty… Leszkowicz presents a rather optimistic vision of the future of Polish art, seeing an opportunity in the strengthening of the commercial segment and the emergence of a new audience fluent in the language of contemporary art. However, also in Zeszyt,y Aneta Szyłak accurately points out the local nature of the phenomenon, “[…] the culture war set on Polish ground is much more fierce than in America and may have a more negative end, since the third circulation of culture in the form of strong alternative institutions which support the art market, have not become robust in our country. Thus, it will be very difficult to find an additional stage where something that has no right to exist in public discourse could actually function”¹⁹. Both views, however, indicate a serious weakness of Polish art – the involvement of art institutions in political disputes in which the rhetoric of culture wars has become a permanent tool. In 2014, art historian Izabela Kowalczyk even periodised the culture wars from the perspective of Polish art – drawing the line between “the first” period and the subsequent ones around 2010²⁰. According to Kowalczyk, “attacks on freedom of artistic expression or gender studies should be seen in the broader context of power games”²¹ where the key role is played by backlash and economic‑cultural social stratification as factors reinforcing distrust towards liberal elites and the culture identified with them. And although, according to the researcher, the “first” culture war was won by libertarian circles – including the final acquittal of Dorota Nieznalska of the charges of “offending religious feelings” – the “social outcome” of this trial left its mark not only on the career of the artist herself (resulting in her exclusion from artistic life), on the artistic community and its institutions, but also on the social perception of contemporary art, including by the political field.

From the perspective of the eight years of the United Right rule when the strategy and rhetoric of culture wars and backlash were extensively employed, the diagnoses formulated ten to twenty years ago turned out to be accurate. Contrary to optimistic predictions, a significant strengthening of the market sector after 2015 in the Polish field of art, a generational change among the recipients of art or the eventual emergence of the “third circulation of culture” did not abate the growing impact of culture wars neither on the conditions of artistic production nor on the reception of contemporary art itself. The turning point of the year 2010 indicated by Kowalczyk (and earlier by Koczanowicz and Burszta) as the start of “the second” culture war, or its more mature stage, may also be connected with a greater recognition of a new ultra‑right political movement (the alt‑right and illiberal turn) due to its spread via the Internet which contributed to a growing popularity on the global scale of voices calling to fight “political correctness” and the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory²². At the end of the Cold War, William S. Lind and William Marshner, authors of the neoconservative agenda of cultural conservatism, presented a diagnosis of the state of American culture, art and science as infiltrated and ideologised by communist agents (“cultural Marxists”) supported by the Democratic Party. This was supposedly demonstrated by “a march through institutions”: the presence of emancipatory postulates, critical theory and the impact of the Frankfurt School on academic discourse, contemporary art and the entertainment industry. In the short term, still in the late 1980s, the think tank of the founders of the Institute for Cultural Conservatism (then already referred to as the Free Congress Foundation) became one of the most influential organisations of its kind in the country which also targeted its operations at Central and Eastern Europe, including Estonia, Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary ²³ or Poland²⁴. In the American political field, the concept of defending “the soul of the nation” was frequently used by the Republicans in their political dispute with the Democrats throughout the 1990s and in the following decade, but the economic crisis of 2008–2009 and Barack Obama’s victory in 2009 contributed to a sharpening of conservative rhetoric. Along with technological changes and growing popularity of social media, the strategy of cultural consumption also changed, as did the use of new media in political struggle. That is why “Cultural Marxism”, often used interchangeably with “neo‑Marxism”, “multiculturalism”, “liberalism” or “political correctness” also appeared in Anders Breivik’s infamous manifesto 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence (2011)²⁵.

It is an important moment on the global scale when the concept of “Cultural Marxism” acquired previously unknown visibility – as an umbrella term for non‑conservative outlooks perceived as “foreign” which threaten the conservative vision of the world, with some researchers also drawing attention to its openly anti‑Semitic nature²⁶. Currently, this key concept for culture wars is used interchangeably with “gender ideology”, “postmodernism”, “civilization of death”, “anti‑culture”, “cancel culture” or “woke”. The biting tone of the conspiracy theory narrative and its visibility in the mainstream media was also enhanced by declaration of “war on Cultural Marxism” made by politicians such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, Janez Jansa, Vladimir Putin or, in Poland, by Przemysław Czarnek, Mateusz Morawiecki or Maciej Giertych. It is no coincidence that a direct reference to this vision of the world also appears in PiS policy papers where cultural struggle between “Genuine Poland” and the “Creole” establishment should be analysed in a broader context, not just as an outcome of political rivalry between PiS and Platforma Obywatelska (Koalicja Obywatelska). The 2019 PiS Policy Programme mentions the rejection of “political correctness”²⁷ imposed through cultural violence and criminal repression, of cultural experiments (“expressing the will of a vast majority of the nation”)²⁸, of cultural revolution, social engineering, “harmful ideology which interferes with social structures”²⁹, “invasion of culture which undermines the foundations of Western civilization and which has already dominated Western Europe”³⁰ or of “gender ideology³¹ and a fight against post‑communism and counterculture (“under the red banner”³²).

An important assumption which features in the conspiracy theory of “Cultural Marxism” is the struggle of the conservative majority against the “vocal minority” which is a close reference to the “Silent Majority” emblematic of the Nixon era. That is why Iwona Kurz, examining the ideological assumptions of the United Right after 2015 in relation to culture, draws attention to a statement made by Wanda Zwinogrodzka, “A lot of people, I would say the majority, have a conservative outlook, even if they are not fully aware of it. […] They also prefer to experience pleasure or elation instead of rage or disgust, which is why when […] they go to an art gallery, they would rather see a captivating painting than an artist’s excrement. And in the theatre – a moving or funny performance, not a chaotic sequence of curses, howls and gasps. This provides an opportunity for us”³³. The opportunity mentioned by this PiS politician, that is the distrust of the general public towards non‑conservative contemporary art or even the perception of its language as “a foreign language” imposed from the outside may be treated in two ways. Firstly as an opportunity for more conservative artistic circles sympathising with the ideological programme of the United Right, and secondly as an opportunity for the audience negatively disposed towards contemporary artistic strategies. A similar discourse, however, definitely based more on conspiracy theory, was also used in 2015 by art critic Monika Małkowska in the text Mafia bardzo kulturalna published in the high‑circulation daily Rzeczpospolita³⁴. This article, important for “the change for the better” (a policy of changes introduced under PiS government between 2015 and 2023), was published in specific socio‑political conditions which allowed it to be read in the context of “growing aversion to art and decreasing interest in it”, as the author put it herself. Małkowska’s diagnosis of the Polish field of art was consistent with the diagnoses of Zwinogrodzka and the United Right – the public’s distrust is caused by the dominance of the liberal establishment, which acts to the detriment not only of the recipients, but also of the milieu itself, or in other words, of the idea of art. The “foreign language” of contemporary art (most often identified with critical art or less traditional means of expression), which does not support a conservative vision of the world, is, from this perspective, unfairly subsidised by the state budget³⁵. Therefore, radical change in cultural policy announced by the United Right was to guarantee pluralisation of cultural institutions – minimising the impact of “foreign” discourse, opening institutions and subsidies to other artistic milieus (by default: conservative ones and genuinely Polish) and to a wider audience than before. These promises were also an important part of policy programmes of directors of important cultural institutions appointed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage such as Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Ujazdów Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and Museum of Art in Łódź³⁶. The backlash, inscribed in the logic of culture wars was also supposed to raise social support (in the artistic community as well) for the political mission carried out in Polish culture and contemporary art, however, despite systemic inequalities perceived by the artistic community often leading to conspiracy theories³⁷ it has not been widely reported. This is a subject which requires further research..

The subject of the current public perception of contemporary art also requires broader analysis – in the 2016 study by Marek Krajewski and Filip Schmidt, when asked about the problems faced by the artistic community, only 15 percent of the respondents mentioned the public’s reluctance towards art, the same number pointed out negative atmosphere within the community, 7% indicated the conservatism of the society, and only 6% mentioned overt or covert forms of censorship³⁸. On the other hand, for the respondents from the artistic community, the threat is negative atmosphere (23%), conservatism (19%), reluctance (14%) and censorship (8%)³⁹. This comparison shows that artists and those from outside the community alike perceive negative attitudes of recipients in a similar way, but the conservatism of the society seems to be a much bigger problem from the perspective of the artists than of the consumers of culture. It is possible that after the last eight years of “the change for the better” the perceptions in both groups may have changed. However, another interesting comparison that appears in Krajewski and Schmidt’s Report is a significant difference between the assessment of the negative impact of insufficient artistic education on the society as a whole – for only 22% of the recipients low standard of art education appears to be a problem while 48% of the respondents from the community itself point it out.

Here, I would like to highlight a very specific threat that is directly connected with culture wars and the conspiracy theory of “Cultural Marxism”, as well as with technological changes in the dissemination of information about culture and art – i.e. the threat of grassroots art education. As part of the 2017 National Culture Conference organised under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Krzysztof Karoń was invited as an expert to a panel discussion on visual arts – and in particular on disseminating information about culture and art. For the liberal part of the National Culture Conference participants, Karoń was totally unknown, but the expert status awarded to him by the organisers of the Conference was due to a significant role he had been playing for several years, that of as a publicist widely recognised in conservative circles and of populariser of the conspiracy theory of “Cultural Marxism”. Since 2010, Karoń had run the internet portal Historia sztuki tylko dla orłów. This website, highly positioned in search engines, contained materials compiled by Karoń on the history of art and culture from prehistory to the present day, becoming a popular source of information for school and university students, including those majoring in the humanities and arts. The Historia sztuki … project was presented from the start as a grassroots educational platform, and the book Historia antykultury (2018) published at his own expense was based on the website’s content. It was intended as a kind of textbook, or “the first attempt to supplement and organise basic information about the mechanisms of social life, the history of culture, and the history of anticultural Marxism”. Karoń’s book was also to serve as the basis for his own Social Information Programme for secondary schools, for which he received The Polish‑American Foundation for Economic Research and Education Award and Józef Mackiewicz Literary Prize. However, before Karoń published the book, he was noticed by the conservative political field as an extremely active and influential populariser of the conspiracy discourse, consistent with the ideological assumptions of the United Right, especially in the field of culture. As Karol Sienkiewicz, a critic present at The National Culture Conference, reported, Karoń’s address at the Conference was limited to an emotionally charged speech⁴⁰ in which he presented his diagnosis of contemporary art as “psychopathology saturated with the idiom of defecation”, which is an expression of the dominance of “Cultural Marxism” – and therefore a model discourse using conspiratorial strategy and the rhetoric of culture wars. Historia antykultury published a year later, as well as the part of the Historia sztuki… portal devoted to modernity and its art, adopted a similar convention. As the author reports in the book, contemporary art eludes the developmental logic of history, because it is “without exception an expression of chaos, chance, mediocrity, destruction, ugliness and, ultimately, pathology, and in this sense it is not a continuation, but a negation of all earlier art. […] [S]earch […] led me to Marxism, an ideology whose aim is unlimited power while the means to achieve it is the elimination of culture and the regression of humanity to a pre‑cultural level, to the level of animals”⁴¹. He claims that “after many years of undergoing the above process, institutions […] have been taken over by hordes of incompetent activists, the only way to neutralise their destructive impact is to question their authority. In a nutshell – defending culture requires the destruction of the institution that perpetuates it [original spelling]” ⁴². Karoń himself understands the term institution in a number of ways – also as a global ideology, calling it interchangeably “Anti‑Cultural Marxism,” “gender ideology,” “magical Marxism,” “genderism,” “Eurocommunism,” or “Freudo‑Marxism,” which are all supposed to lead to enslavement or even depopulation.

Karoń died in 2023, but his work was very well received in the political sphere –Social Information Programme was carried on by Jakub Zgierski, the founder of the portal Młot na markizm, who edited the book Encyklopedia antykultury, also intended as a textbook disseminating the conspiracy theory of “Cultural Marxism”. The book, which is in line with the concepts of the United Right, was published as part of the Odnaleźć siebie project carried out under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and Science while promotional meetings took place for instance at the offices of the Institute of National Remembrance, as well as at Ujazdów Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. As Jan Tarnas, editor‑in‑chief of an institutional art magazine, wrote in an enthusiastic review of the Encyclopedia…, Karoń’s significant achievement is “to inform young people, for whom both the content presented on the aforementioned portal and the published book have become an incentive for further investigation, about the revision of Marxism by Frankfurt School”⁴³. The Encyklopedia… itself is seen by Tarnas as “an exercise in rational reasoning based on logical tools, which is to make the reader aware of the actual state of culture”, which “responds primarily to the systemic crisis of contemporary education. […] And as the examples cited by the authors of the book show, an individual deprived of consciousness is the easiest victim of indoctrination”⁴⁴.

Although the project Odnaleźć siebie disappeared from the Ministry of Education and Science website with the loss of power by the United Right in October 2023, Social Information Programme lost official support from the Ministry, and the concept of anti‑culture and the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory no longer fit into the programme of the ruling coalition, the consequences of their inclusion in the mainstream media will most likely be felt in the next decade. Undiminished global popularity of the alt‑right and illiberal turn, the effectiveness of populist discourse, as well as the paths blazed by the inclusion of conspiracy theories in the mainstream media have clearly influenced outlooks, also among the youngest. These will be the factors that ignite this irresolvable axiological conflict, in which culture, and especially art, are, according to such logic, the easiest elements of social life to attack, mainly due to their relatively elitist nature and the “foreign” language they use in most cases. Therefore, popularity of the rhetoric of culture wars and conspiracy theories is not a response to the “systemic crisis of contemporary education,” but rather its symptom. Similarly, the appeal of the concept of “a very cultured mafia” within the Polish art field is symptomatic of such a highly economically stratified professional environment, susceptible to resentment in the face of unclear and exclusive rules of advancement. While the field of visual arts in Poland has proved relatively resistant to attempts to exert political pressure on its hierarchies and canon of contemporary art, the reception of non‑conservative contemporary art by the public in the face of culture wars which abundantly benefit from technological transformations in the consumption of content and culture, may be significantly influenced by (neo)conservatism. Signals coming from the artistic community itself also indicate sharp polarisation of attitudes within this professional group which favours backlash, the most effective tool in waging culture war, also within the field of art itself.