“Artists should be ‘feared by the powerful’, says former Greek finance minister”.  In his keynote speech at the Moscow Biennale, Yanis Varoufakis discussed the perils of cultural collapse and why the euro is doomed—from an artistic standpoint.

“Yet perhaps worse than art created by committee, Varoufakis said, are attempts to appropriate it by bureaucrats and big businesses. “Art must not be anodyne, culture cannot be decorative,” he said, and artists “should be feared by the powerful in our society; if you are not, you are not doing your job properly”.

In a wry aside, Varoufakis even knocked “forums in which the stars are the postmodernist curators inviting economists to give a lecture to artists”. (…)

But just as Varoufakis began to warn of similar tendencies toward expansionism and recreation of the Soviet past among some of Russia’s political elite, the recording of his speech by Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language television channel, abruptly cut off.” (Source: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/news/159777/)