Anatoly Rykov

Anatoly Rykov is a Russian art and political theorist, art historian, and professor at Saint Petersburg State University.^[1] In his numerous writings, Professor Rykov argues that leftist projects in art and culture often employ repressive and totalitarian concepts and metaphors. He introduced the notion of “radical conservatism” in order to explain this phenomenon in the theoretical matrix of the avant-garde and its postmodern interpretation. He has written on a range of subjects in Renaissance, 18th, 19th and 20th century art.

Anatoly Rykov at the Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art Conference, 2014

In his award-winning book, Postmodernism as radical conservatism (2007), he analyses the connotations of right-wing politics and philosophy in the work of eminent representatives of American art theory. His other publications include Marxism and Loneliness, On the “Political Unconscious” of the Contemporary Humanities in the West, Foundations of Art Theory (2007), Origins of the avant-garde (2016), and Formalism: Sociology of art (2016). His current research project, Russian Art Theory: between Fascism and Shamanism, concerns the issues of convergence between different political and sacral discourses in Russian 20th-century theories of art.^[2]

Works

• Постмодернизм как "радикальный консерватизм" : проблема художественно-теоретического консерватизма и американская теория современного искусства, 1960-1990-х гг. Postmodernism as "radical conservatism" (2007), Sankt-Peterburg: Aleteia, ISBN 9785914190061
• "Politics of Avant-Garde". Moscow, 2019
• Rykov A. Between a Conservative Revolution and Bolshevism: Nikolai Punin’s Total Aesthetic Mobilization. Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 53, no. 2, 2017, pp. 147-171, DOI: 10.1080/10611975.2017.1400270
• Rykov A. V. Absent Look. Edouard Manet and Timothy Clark’s Theory of Modernism. Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Искусствоведение, 10(2), 266-273.