this institution: Now, it is more future-oriented. A new political course, a renewal and modernization of this public museum institution.

The director announces that he is opening the doors wide for new artistic styles and genres. He underlines the historical connection between the past and the present, and how the initial department of the museum, founded in 1892, also started out with the gathering of works of the then-contemporary Bulgarian artists. 19 The National Art Gallery is showing real appetite for the idea of a future museum of contemporary art as an offshoot of its own institutional body. The Gallery turns out to be a true driving force for this process, as it organizes the first auction of contemporary art in Bulgaria in order to create the initial collection of the future museum of contemporary art. If the aim of this auction was to concentrate exclusively on the commercial side and the development of an art market for contemporary art, this could count as a true achievement. But I feel ill at ease thinking of a commercial auction as a positive starting point for a discussion on a museum even if it takes the guise of a charitable event. As Minister Stefan Danailov, namesake of the aforementioned Boris, declares in his speech: The accumulation of the fund out of the sale of the works themselves is of groundbreaking importance for laying the foundations of the new museum. 20 The most important thing, we are told, is to make the first step. The rest will follow. Why are things once more lumped together, and the official institutions find themselves again with strange political strategies neither fish, flesh nor fowl? A question arises from the fund thus raised for this Future museum of contemporary art what is the role of the state and public institutions, and what is the role of the free market in a democratic society? Applying this recipe would result neither in a real art market nor in a really public museum for contemporary art. When you are in an isolated space, the local truths are privileged. Not one of the official art museum institutions is proposing an approach with which to face the facts which remain largely terra incognita to the Bulgarian institutions. In search of a model and discourse more adequate to contemporary art processes, we might want to dwell on the arguments put forth by Ruxandra Balaci, a curator with great experience on the international scene and scientific director of the recently formed National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, located since 2004 in a wing of the monumental and infamous former House of the People, on the

life. What is happening in the public space is also happening here. Thus, the Gallery appears as an active partner to the art of today. <http://www.diplomatic-bg.com/c2/content/view/987/47/1/0/> The National Art Gallery, by Antonia Vitanova. This is ignoring the fact that more or less around this time the first Bulgarian artists to really create works make their appearance, creating something that in form and content can be recognized as fine arts. This process comes monstrously late. On these territories, part of the Ottoman Empire, no worldly paintings or fine arts are produced or created. The iconography is that of canonic church painting, created by anonymous masters, is the only widely accessible notion of this type of art until the beginning of the 19th century, when the concept of the author was imported to these territories from the West along with that of the nation-state. That is how the first true artists and their great works appear on the scene, branded by the fact that they are truly the first in a history. The truth is that after the new modern Bulgarian state was constituted, the deficit in local artistic talents led the forefathers to import Bulgarian national artists are imported from Slavic lands more advanced in their development. The artists invited from the Slavic border regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or from Russia were provided by the state authorities with studios, official positions, grants and other attractive offers to make them stay and fulfill their grand mission to lay the foundations of a Bulgarian art scene. A story reminiscent of that of the new Bulgarian Czar, imported around the same time from the West, along with Brussels needle lace and other fashion attributes brought in to substantiate the glamour of bourgeois ideas of prestige.
20 19

You can get a direct impression of the speech of the Bulgarian Minister of Culture, Mr. Danailov, at the first auction of contemporary art in Bulgaria on 19 December 2006, online at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiRAuhRdAFo> (in Bulgarian).