Is the Sincere Now/New?: Age, Wear, and Ruin in Russian Sincerity Rhetoric

• In Event: The (Late/Post-Soviet) Sincere Is Now

Abstract

Between the late 1980s and today, artists, designers, writers, baristas, musicians, and hackers from multiple world regions have taken recourse to a logic and aesthetics of noise, rawness, and incompletion. In glitch-infused soundscapes, deliberately wonky product designs, blurry or pixilated photographs, and quasi-sloppy garments, they salute rather than shun aesthetic poverty – as token for moral or political integrity, for instance, or for humanness in a digitized age. This paper examines how a selection of influential creative professionals frames the imperfect as hallmark for ‘sincerity’ in Russia (where, historically, sincerity rhetoric boasts a ‘disproportionately high significance’ (Lipovetsky & Beumers 2009), but where traditions of aestheticising poverty or decay are not self-evident (Schoenle 2011)). More pointedly, I explore the role that the passing of time plays in present-day Russian sincerity rhetoric. As my examples demonstrate, this rhetoric is eagerly projected onto ruins, worn artifacts, aged bodies, or other objects on which time left visible traces.

Author

• Ellen Rutten, U of Amsterdam (Netherlands)