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<div style="font-size: 14px;font-family: Avenir Next;"><h1
class="post-title entry-title"><a
href="https://artmargins.com/whose-land-their-art-debates-over-the-tendencies-exhibition-series-1980-81/?utm_source=ARTMargins+Update+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e4884ece95-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_17_02_48_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_55fd54411b-e4884ece95-127993906">Whose
Land, Their Art? </a>Debates over the Tendencies Exhibition Series
(1980–81)</h1><p class="post-byline"> by <span class="vcard author"> <span
class="fn">Kristóf Nagy</span> </span> ·
Published <time class="published" datetime="10/19/2020">10/19/2020</time></p><div
class="entry themeform share"><div class="entry-inner"><p><strong>Money
and Morals Then and Now </strong></p><p>While
at first glance the Artists’ Unions seem to be fossils of Eastern
Europe’s state-socialist past, in fact they are still living with us, in
several ways. First of all, they persist in the dream of a political
utopia: after the short <em>belle époque</em> of welfare states, the
current precarization of the cultural sector—especially affected by the
COVID-19 crisis—provokes debates on the possibility of cultural workers’
unionization even in Eastern Europe. Secondly, while new institutions
emerged after the political transition of 1989, the Artists’ Unions did
not completely lose their importance as integrators of cultural
producers, or as interfaces between those producers and the state. Even
more importantly, new institutions, such as the Hungarian Academy of
Arts, established in 2011, often follow the centralizing and
institutionalizing model of the socialist Artists’ Unions.</p></div></div></div>
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