Photo by sfsignal. Contemplative Photographic Art of Roger Allen Baut™ Frieze Magazine. Ostalgia Trips. The end of August marked the 31st anniversary of the Gdánsk Agreement, the accord which is usually seen as having kick-started the demise of communism.
Today, Adam Michnik, millionaire and owner of Agora Media LLC, speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival as a ‘famous dissident’, while Poland takes over presidency in the EU. But somehow no one questions why, in contemporary capitalist Poland, none of the workers’ postulates in the Gdánsk Agreement of 1980 have been achieved. The more distant the collapse of the Berlin Wall becomes, the more miraculous the events around 1989 seem to be.
The more capitalist these former republics become, the more nostalgia for communism seems to grow. It ranges through art and theory, film and design, books and anthologies, all of which respond more often to communism’s aesthetic than to its political meaning.