Journals Showcase (Witryna Czasopism.pl)

The article which I mentioned described a case of a certain lady, a writer, who emigrated to the West and during her stay there she carried out an in-depth scrutiny of the publishing market. She extrapolated her observations onto the purely Polish reality, thus obtaining a mathematically certain conclusion: in our country, too, some day (i.e. today) literature won’t excite anyone, nobody will be moved by a majestic sentence or a vividly portrayed character; the only thing that will matter will be a scandal, preferably a double one, like in the case of a certain famous clitoris. I must respectfully admit that the lady prophesized this situation quite accurately.

When I contemplate modern painting, the works by Rembrandt, Vermeer or Cezanne keep coming back to my memory as a point of reference. They represent a perfect or near-perfect visual embodiment of the ideal of painting. From that point of view, the exhibition in Zachęta can be described as shreds of the shattered tradition of the ideal of painting, as shaped by the Western tradition. This exhibition may well confirm the fact that we live in an age of a modern iconoclasm, which is all the more surprising because the Western tradition managed to deal very successfully with this disturbing human tendency.