I would like to recommend the catalogue of the 2nd National Salon of Applied Arts in two different ways. First taking a pragmatic approach drawing on the experiences of the previous eight national salons, and then looking at the exhibition concept, based on philosophical history, developed by András B. Szilágyi, the exhibition’s chief curator, and supplementing it with a cultural history commentary including current professional and theoretical details.
1.
We have been organising national salons in the Műcsarnok since 2014. This type of exhibition, harking back to more than 150 years is always called a ’salon’ but the content, and along with it the methods, varies according to the genres featured. The world has been changing at an accelerating pace, inspiring artists to respond. While keeping traditions in mind, our salons keep track of and engage with the most recently emerging qualities. Like it or not: ignoring this duality would be an intellectual blindness and a mistaken reflex.
Salon exhibitions have always attracted criticism and/or recognition from artists and the other players of the cultural scene. The works at the first fine art salons in Paris were juried, and the decisions provoked intense reactions; in the meantime, drawing in millions of visitors every year, they jolted the spirit of French society. Moreover, the increasing media attention granted these shows a Europe-wide response. Thanks to Théophile Gautier, the a new form of art criticism, the feuilleton (column), came into being.1 This was adopted in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy – with some delay – by Lajos Hevesi, both in Vienna and Budapest. Salons were also organised in Paris from the works rejected by the juries: these shows are now regarded as the cradle of a new worldview that was mediated by modern painting and the other branches of art. These exhibitions set in motion the globalisation of the arts, besides the already ongoing globalisation of industry and trade.
The most recent series of domestic national salons, a tradition revived by the Hungarian Academy of Arts, is followed by a heightened sense of curiosity from the public and ‘professional’ circles alike. This is shown by the impressive visitor numbers. The exhibitions showcasing works by Hungarian artists that attracted the greatest attention of the public were the ones held prior to the pandemic starting in 2020: the number of visitors moved on a scale from 20-30 thousand for each of these. Those appreciating the arts have remained loyal to our salons even during the pandemic, instrumental in this being that we have been able to share the material of the shows on social media channels in as up-to-date a fashion as possible. The number of people following these events confirms that unbroken success of the national salons. The amount of outstanding works submitted within each genre to the salons by artists from Hungary and abroad regularly exceeds the capacity of the Műcsarnok. As can be seen by the majority of the feedback, our complex objectives – seeking to satisfy the requirements of the profession while also aspiring to be visitor-friendly – have been met.
On four occasions I called on the most highly recognised curators/artists of the art scene to fill the halls of the Műcsarnok based on their concepts.2 On the fifth occasion, the National Salon of Folk Art, we invited curators to participate in a tender with Ferenc Sebő as the president of the jury. In the first round, it was not the winning curators who selected the works: the winners of the tender compiled the material for the mega exhibition from among works that had already passed through a long-standing, regional collecting process. It is no coincidence that this approach was applied to folk art, the genre closest to tradition, since despite the changes that had taken place globally, the decisive factor here was knowing the artists, preserving the traditions of hundreds of year old folk crafts – at times surviving in small, hidden villages – either personally or through their work.
Now, at the national salon of 2022, the chief curator, András B. Szilágyi, is helped in his work with advice from experts thoroughly familiar with the featured genres and artists. Moreover, this year we were able to use the lessons learnt from the above-mentioned – respectable – curatorial achievements, although the five years that pass between two salons is clearly a significant period of time. For example, the fine arts salon of the second cycle could only be opened virtually because of the pandemic. After the restrictions were partly lifted, the number of accompanying exhibitions as well as the number of visitors allowed to attend them were restricted by the emergency rules. Yet, interest in the salons and our other exhibitions did not abate in the online space; indeed, the number of physical and virtual visitors combined was at pre-Covid levels. Nevertheless, the online mode of operation takes its toll when it comes to appreciating art personally, physically and with all our senses.
The recent period has left its mark on two areas that belong to the collecting scope of this year’s national salon: two, not so closely related industries. According to experts, it can be anticipated that the intensified of use virtual communication, forced on us by the pandemic, will lead to a depression both in aircraft and automobile production. The development of automobiles has always been the driving force of design. So is it possible that the shrinking car manufacturing sector will change an entire industry? Conversely, the pandemic had a boosting effect on another area: that of medical instruments and hospital equipment. In my introduction to the 2017 national salon of applied arts I discussed and criticised the threatening predictions made by Ray Kurzweil, information scientist, inventor and the director of engineering at Google, in his singularity concept.3 And now, our personal and recreational environments as well as communal spaces are growing increasingly transparent/void of meaning(?) as they are following an ever more minimalist direction as a result of the time management dictated by the lockdowns; as a result, our attention is shifted again to architectural and object designs that focus on individuality and carry our cultural and group identities along with a personal tone. There is a revived need for this but the question remains: will there be enough artists still privy to tradition to satisfy this need?
An indirect answer to the above: as we are preparing for the third national salon of the second cycle, an excellent exhibition of Márton Barabás, demonstrating the artist’s knowledge of diverse handicrafts, can be seen in the Műcsarnok. A reporter, enthused by the show – with good reason – asked him: “What would Gustav Klimt be doing now?” (Klimt was a pioneer of modernism in Vienna at the turn of the century, and the last giant of the 19th century.) Let me freely quote the Barabás’s answer: in contrast to today’s minimalism, Klimt attended the first of the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna (Museum für Angewandte Kunst) with artists who were able to work together with architects. In the spirit of Symbolism and then, in the grandeur of the Secession they created Central European modern art with Vienna and Budapest as its centres. They did not advocate applied decorative arts or, in contrast to this, autonomous art, but rather a total art that united these. This trend was then deleted by the Great War. Klimt – as many others at the vanguard – died of a pandemic: the Spanish flu, which swept across Europe at the end of the war. Making a soft analogy, Barabás answered the above question with reference to two of his ’highly talented’ students: “One of them is enriching contemporary visual culture on clients in a tattooing salon, and the other by covering the retaining walls of tramline 2 with graffiti.”
2.
The second, theoretical part of my introduction seeks to call attention to precedents that hark back to more than just the past 150 years. On a civilizational scale, even in a moderate calculation, we have a hindsight of 3,000 years and related insights going back to the same period. The cyclical pattern of history was revived by Edgar Quinet in the middle of the 19th century, exactly at the time when the prestige of the French salons in conjunction with the world’s fairs in Paris increased. He claims that biological life cycles with booms and declines are repeated in the changes in civilizational changes and in the history of peoples. Today the main concern – perhaps only temporarily – is not the alarming future defined by robots and singularity, but the vicious conflict between tradition and progress. In the meantime, it is no use replacing the discourse based on hegemony by one based on another ideology. Instead, it is a more important question if the essential elements such as handwriting and handicrafts shaping our human identity and determining the current cycle of decline and boom can be salvaged into the next cycle. The idea of the cyclical nature of civilisation was pro- posed a good two hundred years ago – not for the first time since the predictions of Babylonian astrologers. Emil Páleš, a contemporary philologist active in Bratislava, said, “[…] Phenomena inexplicable with materialist tenets are on the increase in various professional areas, and generally end up in the drawer labelled »accidental«. One of these phenomena is human creativity. Psychologist cannot understand it or locate its source. Cultural anthropology and sociology failed in their attempts to find the reason for the synchronicity of peak achievements of creativity and groups of geniuses in the course of history. It is well known that the achievements of musical composers peaked in the 19th century and those of painters in the Renaissance, in the 15th century, while the greatest minds of philosophy appeared in the 5th century BC. […] This mystery has deeper dimentions. Creativity is often manifest simultaneously at different points of the world. A well-known example is the axial age, coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. In the entire ancient world, starting from 600 BC, religious reformers and philosophers emerged at the same time: Confucius, Laozi, Buddha, Mahavira, Zarathustra, the great Greek thinkers and the prophets of Israel.”4 Based on the dates and deduction mentioned by Páleš and our more immediate experience of the century of isms, the conclusion might appear reasonable that the 20th-21st century is a possible such inflexion point in the cycles of the visual arts. Nikolai D. Kondratiev, a Soviet Russian economist, historically established 40-80-year cycles in the 20th-century economy. Sources from 1770 to 2008 recorded six main cycles of boom and doom, predominantly linked to the development in the energy and industrial high-tech sectors, while the rate of cyclical changes has been accelerating.
If I start out from the assumption that the visual arts are a civilizational-scale entity, it makes no sense to oppose the applied arts and the design of our age. Above I used the expression ‘it’s no use’ to oppose tradition and progress. In his writing titled Design vagy iparművészet [Design or Applied Arts]5 Márton Szentpéteri calls the appearance of CAD a milestone in the history of applied arts. The terms he uses in his outline of the history of concepts are interpreted differently by the opposing camps. The closing section of his study should be quoted here, nevertheless, since its open-ended train of thought suggests the aforementioned cyclical process: “[…] Kraft was again forced into the defensive in the heroic age of modern design, all the way up to the sixties, and it owed its first spectacular return to the radical and antidesign aspirations that emerged in the studios of prominent figures like Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini as a reaction to gutes Design, which had anticipated the period of postmodern design and had been seen as the apotheosis of modern design. Criticising what they saw as faceless modern mass products, the advocates of the new handicraft embraced techniques used by individual craftsmen and in small workshops; besides confirming the importance of kraft, some of them even equated design with the fine arts […].”6 Let me add, the same thing happened in the peak period of the visual arts cycle in the Renaissance.
“[…] The global economic crisis of 2008, in tandem with the cultural effects of new technologies, exerts an extraordinary influence on the discourse on new crafts – even in the spirit of hybridity which is especially trendy in today’s maker movement, for example, which promotes the combination of traditional and new technologies as well as classical and intelligent materials and treats it as natural.7 […] Hence, kraft was far from being obliterated by the emergence of the beau or fine arts, applied arts and modern design; on the contrary, it is being revived as we speak. We can therefore safely state that art, design and kraft are parallel worlds and interact in contemporary design culture through the most varied symbiotic and synergic connections, rather than being in a hierarchical relation, which was once the case with the liberal and servile arts, the fine arts and the applied arts, or Avant-garde design and applied arts.”8 Do I understand this correctly? Regardless of the separate definitions we give to these concepts, is something new in progress? Simultaneously with the accelerating global technology and commercial pressure, we can keep our masters, who have preserved the knowledge that accumulated in the hand-made arts throughout the thousands of years and will pass it down to the next, approaching golden age. When chief curator András B. Szilágyi organised the works of this year’s salon around the theoretical framework of Aristotle’s Organon – called categories in his concept for linguistic reasons, he explained that his objective was to avoid the opposition (which I described as ’not useful’) between applied arts and design. Let me commend András B. Szilágyi’s concept and work. I want to thank Eleonóra Balogh, Noémi Ferency Award-winning glass artist, who is the curator of the special section of the salon exhibition to mark the UN International Year of Glass, as well as all the experts who gave their advice; let me also thank Levente Szabó, Miklós Ybl Award- and Prima Award-winning architect, who designed the installations, and his team, the Seventh Studio, as well as graphic artists Ákos Polgárdi and Lili Tóth, who made the identity and graphic design and designed the catalogue. My greatest appreciation goes out to the staff members and contributors of the Műcsarnok, especially to the curators’ assistants – Júlia Szerdahelyi, Szilvia Reischl and Dóra Dekovics – and technical manager István Steffanits.
György Szegő DLA
artistic director of Műcsarnok
1 Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Heinrich Heine and Julien Louis Geoffroy frequently published articles on fine arts in the newspapers, but it was the articles regularly published by Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) – a poet and writer who trained to be a painter – in the daily La Presse that stirred striking interest. He mainly wrote about the salons as well as the 1st and 2nd Paris World’s Fairs (in 1855 and 1867 – they replaced the salons not held in those years). Most of the works exhibited there, however, were French, meaning: these were national salons. Then, the national exhibitions of the other pavilions also only presented a selection from the fresh projects of industrial and fine arts. The counterculture, which emerged in painting, was supported by the press, firstly in L’Avant-garde, the periodical of an anarchist, Pjotr A. Kropotkin, published in Switzerland. For this, see: Ilona Sármány-Parsons’s chapter titled “A világkiállítások szerepe a művészetkritika felértékelődésében” [The Contribution of World’s Fairs to the Appreciation of Art Criticism] in the volume Bécs művészeti élete Ferenc József korában, ahogy Hevesi Lajos látta [Artistic Life in Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, as Seen by Lajos Hevesi] (Balassi Kiadó, Budapest, 2019, 44–59), and György Szegő’s review about it titled Egy budapesti Bécsben [A Budapester in Vienna] (Magyar Építőművészet 2020/2. Post Scriptum, 58–59).
2 The eight salons: 1st National Salon of Architecture, 2014 (curator: György Szegő, co-curators: Lőrinc Csernyus, Attila Turi, Barnabás Winkler, Balázs Balogh, Antal Lázár, Ferenc Salamin, László Sáros, Kinga M. Szilágyi, Bálint Botzheim); 1st National Salon of Applied Arts, 2015 (curator: Júlia N. Mészáros); 1st National Salon of Photography, 2016 (curator: Klára Szarka); 1st National Salon of Applied Arts, 2017 (curators: Ernő Sára, József Scherer, co-curators: Eszter Götz, Éva M Tóth); 1st National Salon of Folk Art, 2018 (curators: Katalin Beszprémy, Ágnes Fülemile, co-curators: Zoltán G. Szabó, Miklósné Pál, Béla Szerényi); 2nd National Salon of Architecture, 2019 (curator: György Szegő, co-curators: Mihály Balázs, Bálint Botzheim, Eszter Götz, Ferenc Potzner, Péter Pozsár, Miklós Sulyok, senior contributor: Júlia Szerdahelyi); 2nd National Salon of Fine Arts, 2020 (chief curator: József Szurcsik, curator: Mária Kondor-Szilágyi); 2nd National Salon of Photography, 2021 (curator: László Haris, co-curator: András Bán). Each year the curators were assisted in their work by prominent experts as well as the curator’s assistants and staff of the Műcsarnok.
3 Ray Kurzweil: A szingularitás küszöbén [The Singularity Is Near]. Ad Astra Kiadó, Budapest, 2013. (He uses the Latin word to denote superhuman intelligence.) For this, see György Szegő: Magyarországról jöttünk, mesterségünk címere… [We’ve come from Hungary, our trade sign is…] In: Körülöttünk. I. Iparművészeti és Tervezőművészeti Nemzeti Szalon [All Around Us. 1st National Salon of Applied Arts and Design], Budapest, Műcsarnok 2017. 17–24.
4 Emil Páleš: Seven Archangels. Rhythms of Inspiration in the History of Culture and Nature. Sophia, Bratislava, 2009. 11–13.
5 Márton Szentpéteri: Design vagy iparművészet / Fogalomtörténeti vázlat [Design or Applied Arts / An Outline of the History of Concepts]. Korunk, 2017/2. 39–45.
6 (Szentpéteri, op. cit. note 22) For this, see, e.g. l. Jonathan Woodham: Pop to Post-Modernism: Changing Values. In: Idem: Twentieth-Century Design. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. 183–203, esp. 191–198. Alessandro Mendini’s famous Proust armchair (Poltrona di Proust), which Manlio Brusatin simply referred to as “the little monument of the Postmodern era” (piccolo monumento dell’età postmoderna), isvery telling in this context, see Alessandro Mendini: Storia della Poltrona di Proust (1976–2001). In: Idem: Scritti. (Ed. Loredana Parmesani) Skira, Milano, 2004. 206–209. Cf. Manlio Brusatin: Arte come design. Storia di due storie. Einaudi, Torino, 2007. 183.
7 (Szentpéteri, op. cit. note 25). See, for example, Mark Hatch: The Maker Movement Manifesto. McGraw-Hill Education, New York, 2014.
8 (Szentpéteri, op. cit. note 26). It is another matter that in the age of total aesthetisation and design capitalism every counterculture tames down sooner or later and becomes part of the spectaculum; this is clearly illustrated by the phenomena of ’greenwashing’, ’social washing’ and ’sustainability washing’.