Institutionalized Hegemonies: The Socialist Origins of the Right-Wing Dominance in the Hungarian Artists’ Unions

• In Event: Creating for the State During Socialism: The Role of Artists' Unions

Abstract

My paper examines the late-socialist restructuration of the Hungarian artists’ unions to understand why they got bound to conservative hegemonic projects for the 1990s. Artists’ unions were interfaces between individual cultural producers and the state, where conflicts among the factions of cultural producers and political society were negotiated and hegemonic projects were institutionalized. While in Hungary after 1989 the top-down structured cultural funds were reorganized following Western patterns, the bottom-up structured artists’ unions became primarily the territory of the right. By going beyond the monolith understanding of the state and the party I argue that these political divides within the field of cultural production were already present before 1989, and were only reinforced by the post-transition ideological elite-polarization between the right-wing populism and the left-liberal anti-populism. The hegemony of populist, often nationalist factions within the artists’ unions emerged already in the 1980s and they got dominant positions even in the editorial board of the Union’s magazine Művészet (Art). My argument – based on the archival research in the Union of Visual Artists – is that that it could happen because the formally democratic and horizontal unions’ inclusiveness were more appreciated by the right-wing, populist factions of cultural producers, while their liberal counterparts got rather incorporated into the project-based logic of international artistic productions.

Author

• Kristóf Nagy, Central European U (Hungary)