A Mirror of the Art System According to Kęstutis Šapoka

Review of: Kęstutis Šapoka, Art, Criticism, and Ideology in the East European Borderland / Translated from Lithuanian by Tomas Čiučelis, foreword translated by Dalia Cidzikaitė, Vilnius: Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, 2025 – 199 pp. ISBN 978-609-8231-89-2

Abstract

The review looks at Kęstutis Šapoka’s monograph “Art, Criticism, and Ideology in the East European Borderland” (Vilnius: Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, 2025), focusing on its political and social aspects. The reviewer interprets the Šapoka’s analysis of art and art criticism in Lithuania as closely aligned with Adam Curtis’s insights regarding the similarities between neoliberal stagnation and the late Soviet era. Neoliberal ideology, which is becoming invisible to critics of ideology, is presented as the one that continues the Soviet tradition of “ideology of the given moment.” Šapoka’s polemical study of art criticism offers a more accurate assessment of the features of Lithuanian imitative pluralism.