Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 24

I’LL DO IT WHEN DAME JUDI DENCH DOES IT.
Throughout the entire communist era and particularly at the time when Song of Romania
was in existence, intellectuals and professional artists in particular were pressed by one
grave concern. They feared that the festival�through its force-fed diversity and absurdly
wide-reaching levels of participation and engagement�was mixing professional artists
with amateurs and non-artists entering the stage straight from factories, shop floors, or
the fields. In its politically motivated obsession with portraying the working man as the
authentic creator of art, the state turned its full attention to amateur artists and non-artists
to the detriment of professional artists. The professional’s role remained only that
of safeguarding, nurturing, and supporting the yet-undiscovered genius of the working
man: “Professional artistic institutions grant qualified support to amateur artists collaborating
with them in order to increase the qualitative level of the performance” (Scînteia
1976:1).
The festival therefore functioned as an efficient instrument for depriving professional
artists of their traditional status of innovators and creators of artistic work. Their
aspirations, dreams, and creativity were deliberately diluted in the cacophonic soup
of amateurisms and non-professional, semi-artistic, and proto-folkloric activities of
Song of Romania. The professional artist’s message, expressed in a clearly articulated,
skilful artistic discourse, was thus trivialised and lost. Professional artists saw Song of
Romania as the regime’s perfidious way to deprive them of their basic identity, that of
experts in a particular field of art. The Communist Party’s paternalistic, derogatory attitude
towards professional artists is encapsulated in the words of painter Sabin Bălașa
(himself an uneasy supporter of the regime’s thinking on art): “The artist’s personal
happiness cannot be conceived but in the context of the happiness of the country’s
entire community” (Bălașa 1975:4). How can that ever be true, when artistic freedom
is not a question of happiness, but instead of investigating existence in all its peaks and
pitfalls?
Professional artists suffered due to Song of Romania, lost as they were in a sea of pseudo-artistic
activities. From an aesthetic point of view, the festival was indubitably kitsch
on the grandest of scales. On the same stage there would appear, in succession, ballerinas,
folk instrument players, military school students, artistic brigades from factories,
folk dancers, mountain rangers, and Party activists, followed by choirs and poetry recitals.
The festival was an aesthetic ratatouille. The audiences’ artistic taste was as such
profoundly affected, given the illogical amalgam of genres, competencies, and talent on
display. The expression Song of Romania was eventually adopted into arts circles’ parlance
and used to denote the dubious artistic value of a particular artwork, show, film,
etc. “This is like Song of Romania!” a vexed theatre critic would exclaim, condemning the
aesthetic mishmash of a certain theatre performance. Song of Romania sought to put in
practice what I argue to be the unfounded and dangerous idea that anyone can become
an artist when and if the Party says so. At the time, subversively or less so, this way of
thinking had been sanctioned by intellectuals and artists alike as dangerously utopian
and as a political instrumentalisation of art.
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