by Pavel Şuşară
excerpt A few essential socio-economic mutations have occurred in Romania in the last decade. Gaining individual freedom, in addition to the possibility of free economic initiative, briefly, the first steps towards a market economy, had as an immediate consequence the need to rebuild the social status and to redefine the identity. The dynamic, with a flexible, pragmatic thinking, with greater resources capable of exploiting freedom and adjusting to the new conditions, quickly built imposing residences, with generous spaces, often surpassing the strict scale of functionality. Like medieval communities that defined their cohesion and economic clout by building cathedrals that shifted the accent from function to representation, the new players of our market economy strove to convey a simultaneous message of power through the projects of their abodes. To a certain, specific external look that anyone can perceive corresponds, in the interior, an intimate space, subtle, hard to manage visually, and as hard to control morally. That space must be populated with furniture, functional objects, symbolic representations, and spiritual marks. The house is a small universe that contains everything, from the tritest matter to the higher relation with heaven, but, essentially, it is also the faithful portrait of its occupant. In this sense, one of the most difficult and delicate problems is furnishing the interior with pieces of art. Despite what one may believe at first sight, this is not a collateral, facultative matter. It is crucial to psychological comfort, to moral sanity, and to the symbolic coherence of any person who has created a stable relation with its own space. But, as in this country everything falls in the category of unprecedented experiences, this concern with decorating the interior is also exposed to countless risks. What is the purpose of purchasing art objects, what are the criteria of selection, where must they be bought from, and how are they looked upon, economically and culturally, at the moment of the acquisition? These are only a few questions on the answers to which directly depend the sense of the investment, the quality of the objects, and the buyer's contentment. In most cases, art acquisitions have been made without specialized advice, or following the suggestion of the architect who built the house (a novice in art, but with a clientele of artists and dealers on standby), the selection was made arbitrarily, and the quality of the works has usually been mixed, even doubtful. The rush for important names of Romanian art and the promise of low prices filled many collections with forgeries, while authentic works of great value belonging to artists unknown to makeshift dealers and to the public at large due to cultural and information deficiencies were altogether ignored. The way an art collection is constituted, the circulation of fakes, the Romanian artists who are the most vulnerable to forgery, but also the safety of investments through the purchase of genuine works, are absolutely mandatory subjects for a public debate, and an unmistakable sign of social maturity. Excluding such qualified discussions, one may expect at any time such and such former cigarette dealer, turned painting wholesaler overnight out of the vanity to compete with great collectors, rave about art, lisping his broken grammar, like a Martian lost in the Romanian transition. Romania literara 4/2004
by Pavel Şuşară
by Pavel Şuşară