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Greg Afinogenov

Greg Afinogenov is a graduate student in history at Harvard University. He helps to run a small press, the Corresponding Society, and is an editor of its biannual journal Correspondence. In addition to writing for ArtCat and Idiom, he translates twentieth-century Russian poetry.

Shelf Life: Berlin at the End of History

by Greg Afinogenov on July 16, 2010
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These buildings, of course, no longer exist in their old context. Today, they function as tourist destinations, as members of a long list of “sights”—from concentration camps to dance clubs—that visitors to Berlin are expected to see. Yet something in them remains unsettled: as the Roter Saal reminds us, they exist as spaces out of joint with their time, subsisting uneasily as links to moments that are not simply outdated but, in effect, unassimilable. They provide us with an opportunity to question not only how the city copes with such irruptions of anachronism, but also the conditions of their apparent necessity. We need these places, but we don’t know why.

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The Poverty of Privacy: Google, Facebook, and the New Jeffersonians

by Greg Afinogenov on June 4, 2010
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It suffices most of the time to accuse someone of collecting information (search data, shopping patterns, demographics) for all the toxic bubbles of suspicion to float to the surface. Surely you’re not in the business of making money off of information? Why would you need so much information anyway? And can you really not tell if it’s me buying the Hello Kitty vibrators?

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Materialism and Art-criticism: A Response to Ben Davis’ “9.5 Theses on Art and Class”

by Greg Afinogenov on May 13, 2010
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Were Engels to read Ben Davis’s “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” written and circulated in early 2010, he would no doubt be shocked out of his complacency. He would immediately recognize, of course, the phrases that he and Marx had coined so long ago: “working class,” “relations of production,” “class interests.” Something of the style would also seem faintly like his own. Indeed, to Engels’s undead eyes the strangest expression would probably be “middle-class,” used by Davis, it seems, in place of “petty bourgeois.” Almost everything would be familiar—and yet everything would be strange.

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A Portrait of Bureaucracy in Twelve Parts; Seventeen Moments

by Greg Afinogenov on March 12, 2010
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Viewed in this way, the film’s notion of bureaucracy and institutional structure appears quite unconventional. In the classic Weberian model, bureaucracy is characterized by meritocratic values, impersonal legal norms, and a particular kind of instrumental rationality; according to popular stereotype, bureaucracies are staffed by faceless functionaries and prize process over results. Yet here, the bureaucracy is defined precisely by the personal relationships that subsist between its employees. Its fault is not that it is too abstract or too by-the-book. Quite the opposite: bureaucratic politics in Seventeen Moments of Spring is quintessentially narrow-minded and myopic. It sins, in short, by refusing engagement with abstract questions.

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Notes on Art and Ideology in Israel

by Greg Afinogenov on February 1, 2010
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The paintings revisit, again and again, the familiar touchstones of Israeli conservatism: religion, motherhood, military prowess, the return of the diaspora, the struggle for national survival. From their thematic arrangement a kind of total worldview emerges—self-sufficient and, no doubt, inspirational, but also ossified and incapable of change. None of the paintings even seem to acknowledge that Israel is a country undergoing rapid and unsettling transformations (which are symbolized, not least, by Azrieli’s own skyscrapers). Their most common visual idiom is a vaguely Chagallian, vaguely sentimental image of shtetl life, which serves only to illustrate the process by which an artistic style developed by the marginalized and downtrodden has become the dead matter of institutional art.

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The Apparatus as Artist and Spectator

by Greg Afinogenov on December 15, 2009
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To a great extent, the world of these photographs, like the photographs themselves, is a creation (in that outsider-art kind of sense) of the aparát. Not the buildings, for they are, by and large, much older; and not the people, for they, like early Christians, are in the world without being of it; but the whole impersonal network of social relationships that sustains the Party and, by extension, the State; carving out the tracks along which the passersby are always so determinedly marching. There is, in other words, an inherent ambiguity here, which places this particular tentacle of the aparát in the peculiar position of being simultaneously artist and spectator.

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The Ninotchka Effect

by Greg Afinogenov on October 29, 2009
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In fact, the line of filiation for The Lives of Others leads directly back to another, classic film. Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 comedy Ninotchka. Ninotchka, set mostly in idyllic prewar Paris, is far from the life-or-death drama of Henckel’s Berlin. Here, the threat of being sent to Siberia is repeatedly played for laughs, and the only direct suggestion of the Great Terror is the titular character’s casual remark that it will lead to “fewer, but better, Russians.” In Ninotchka, however, we find the same ideological coordinates that would later be used to such great effect in The Lives of Others.

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Purloined Letters: On Networked Art and Identity

by Greg Afinogenov on October 2, 2009
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There was a tension between these two dimensions of Internet identity. The more freedom remained to the individual to alter his own self-presentations, the more potential there was for (occasionally extreme) abuses of trust and the more difficult it was to create cohesive community ties. Most online communities developed social, rather than programmatic, solutions—formal and informal codes of behavior that limited the degree of experimentation open to their members. But a broader cultural phenomenon also emerged: a pervasive cult of unfiltered emotional rawness and sincerity coupled with an equally pervasive anxiety about insincerity and deception.

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On Christopher Payne: Nostalgia and the Asylum

by Greg Afinogenov on August 28, 2009
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I knew what I would hear. The photographer, fresh from a day trip to one of the more convenient asylum-hulks in the area, would play up the Gothic-horror angle, show lurid closeups of bloodstained old medical equipment, insinuate that the place was haunted, then hawk his book to the audience.

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