The underground's notes.

So performance began.
I was symbolically stabbed in the heart. Then "singing newspaper"
(musicians and artists who bring art to sacrifice at short-term social problems) pushed me into the grave. The grave was deep enough. The soil was a heavy clay loam, and even with shrapnel bricks and stones.

Already twenty centimeters of soil feels like enormous gravity. When a soil closed my face, I felt a real fear. But I became calm using force of will. While "anti-culture" orate a farewell speech on my grave I've scarcely read Lermontov's poem ("Alone I go on the road..."). I thought about art. Suddenly, surfaced in the memory a scene from the film "Nostalgia" by Andrey Tarkovsky. I watched the film once in early youth. An old, homeless artist or thinker, delivers hot critical speech against modern culture, society and people near the ancient monument of the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius in Rome. And then he commits self-immolation. He writhe and shouts of unbearable pain, while the local street buffoon, who amuse tourists for a few coins continuing his case like nothing happened. And the whole scene takes place a backdrop Beethoven's music "Ode to Joy".

I was released from the soil, but still didn't come to myself, when I have to answer to the stupid questions of the correspondent (like this "Have you opened something new? What's the meaning of life?" and so on). I tried to make the form of structured logic of what comes as intuitive and vague insight first. I thought about the essence of art. About that art has purposeless nature. In fact, creativity does not happen because
there is a certain task before man. Creative work is not a means to solve this task. The main reason of art is that this way an individual expresses his personal view of the world, his attitude towards world and to himself in this world. If we talk about true artist, at least.
If the creativity comes from another beginning, such as the thirst for money and glory, we can say almost certainly - there is pathetic craftsman in front of us. Art, in this way, is the "modus vivendi" of individual. In this sense, art is forever and independent neither from the society nor from the era. The primitive painted mammoth on the walls of his cave and the modern artist have the same existential motivation. But the social institutions - religion, state power, market demand (in the modern era) invasive penetrate into the creative process and "suggesting", "advising" to the artist what and how to do. And yet, such intervention is not always purely negative. We admire of the creations of Michelangelo, and do not confused by the fact that those made on the order of the inquisitorial Roman Catholic Church. And, even if our world is doomed to die, its dying convulsions will reflect in the artifacts.
The art itself is not enough strong to save or transform the world.
Its strength is that it only could identify all the bottomless tragedy and all the immense greatness of a man.

Dmitry Kremnev.