Paper short abstract:

Cultural industries have become the newest spaces of expropriation, and a focus of polices touting "cultural creativity" as a global competitive advantage. My paper aims to elucidate what these processes mean for a Russian provincial city, its publics, and its "postsocialist condition".

Paper long abstract:

New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/arts/design/27debate.html) made internationally known the ongoing war in the field of cultural productions in the Russian city of Perm. The project of a Moscow galerist to transform a notoriously "provincial" and "untrendy" Russian city into a "cultural capital of Europe" resulted in a high-profile locus of moral/political/aesthetic struggles: federal vs. local vs. global; postmodernist vs. modernist vs. (pre?)modernist; the elites and the "ordinary" citizens; the Soviet and the post-soviet. What is culture, what is its role in people's well-being, and who gets to decide?

Some answers to these questions arose as a part of a contemporary ethnography of Perm focused on the life of thirty-something year olds of median income, some of whom happen to be the producers, and many the dwellers and the (un)voluntary consumers, of the city's new cultural landscape. I identify, arguably, three sides to this ongoing conflict - the Moscow galerist and the "cosmopolitan" local intelligentsia; the parts of local intelligentsia that oppose the "invaders"; and the publics who are not actively engaged in the production of culture in Perm. The latter have to rely on the other two (or the ethnographer) to convey and articulate their needs and desires. Supplementing interviewing and observation with the study of the media, this paper attempts to discuss the contestations - and solidarities - in Perm's cultural wars through the analysis of the publics and their modes of engagement with the symbolic, engagement which plays itself out within a politically-laden discursive field of "provinciality" and "boredom".