| This dissertation is an ethnography of Kazakhstan's art world after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on fifteen months of anthropological field research in Almaty and Astana, in Kazakhstan, I inquire into the discourses and practices of aesthetic production as visual artists have adjusted to the withdrawal of state sponsorship, and begun recruiting private consumers and commercializing their artwork. Participant observation in professional artist associations and private galleries, artists' households and studios, as well as interviews and media analysis revealed the failure of the expectations that economic liberalization would automatically foster the art market. Even though the economy was booming with plentiful expendable cash and a substantial middle class in the mid-2000s, Kazakhstani artists struggled with low consumer demand for art. In order to generate private support for their artwork, many artists drew on Soviet-era discourses and framings of art, namely, their previous prestige. The high status and cultural capital of artists had been directly connected to the socialist regime of value that prioritized service to society and public welfare. In this light, I suggest that practices of the commodification of art offer vital insights into a shifting semiotics of Soviet and post-Soviet cultural capital.;My main argument is that the processes of commercialization of art in Kazakhstan reanimate elements of socialist-era cultural capital. I refer to this practice as a recalibration whereby the form and the distinguishing power of cultural capital are preserved but transformed in meaning. Artists refurbished vestiges of Soviet prestige in a variety of ways. The artists I worked with created commercial value and generated consumers through the invocation of their own role in public well-being and cultural wealth. Some emphasized the "social utility" of art in involving the state and private businessmen in financial responsibility for the arts. Others invoked their "proximity" to government officials or demonstrated international recognition of their art---both elements of Soviet-era cultural capital---to intimate the prominence of their customer base to potential clients. Rather than appealing to individual self-interest, these artists commodified their art and produced capitalist value through reference to the common good.;The art market constituted through these rearticulations of Soviet-era forms of cultural capital defies typical visions of the market as democratic and decentralized. In the process of reappropriating previous prestige, artists have also reinstituted earlier hierarchies. In this way, the Soviet-era insistence on "quality" reappeared, exerting its hierarchizing and homogenizing effect on artistic production. Similarly, the Soviet-era criticism of opportunism has resurfaced: artists who ingratiated themselves with customers were ostracized as insincere. The combination of insights on how Kazakhstani artists use Soviet-era prestige elements to commercialize art with how the Soviet legacy produces a market that is hierarchical and centralized, indicates the ways in which capitalist and socialist regimes of value intersect in complex and unexpected ways. This study of the emerging art market in a former Soviet national republic is a contribution to the scholarly debates on artistic production, the market, and social class. |
