International Art Exhibitions as a Form of Cultural and Political Dialogue

Abstract

The paper focuses on presenting the role of international exhibitions in the political life of various countries as spaces where cultural and political dialogue is organized. As the main examples the cultural cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Paris-Moscow and Moscow-Paris exhibitions organized on the joint initiative of France and the USSR in 1979 and 1981, as well as the exhibitions of American post-war art in the Tate were considered. The article also examines several more examples of such events in order to support the idea that such events were indeed the flow of political dialogues on many levels, from the search for common points in art on the exhibition scene to the covert processes of negotiation and correspondence that made these exhibitions come to fruition. At the same time the paper presents the specifics of cultural relations between the United States and the USSR, and directly within the Western community, without using the comparison of Europe and the USSR as the only obvious political confrontation and antithesis.