The Dynamics of Artistic Recognition in Russian Post Soviet Press

This paper explores the dynamics of author-artist recognition in the Russian Post-Soviet press. As Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1993) and De Nooy (de Nooy, 1991) noted, critic recognition is a valuable mean of legitimation in the art field which help artists as other actors to increase their prestige. Prestige there depends on the past success of actors and admission by institutions or gatekeepers. In addition, not only artists' and other actors' trajectories are derived from previous experience but also critics or authors can determine their future career with the choice of the figure for criticizing. The question of dynamic prestige was discussed by researchers on a wide range of topics, including literature (de Nooy 1999, Anheier and Gerhards 1991), art (Nooy, 2002, Menger, 2001; Giuffre, 1999), the film industry (Cagle, 2007), Hollywood musical industry (Faulkner, 1987), however, in this work, the importance of studying post-Soviet cultural production is emphasized because of the specifics and limitations that the field of art underwent in the Soviet period. The analysis will use data from the culture section of the Russian newspaper Kommersant for a 10-year period. The analysis includes social networks on the mentions of cultural figures by authors (and social networks based on semantics-evaluative categories of critical judgments), as well as a dynamic predictive model describing the degree of the authors' statements in 6 spheres of culture. By applying social network analysis, it is possible to analyze longitudinal data and control changes happening over the time.