Consider the nature and function of art and art historical scholarship in the present: Is there still a line—even fine or porous—securing the fragile autonomy of the arts and humanities from commodification in late capitalism? Can art still serve as a negative and critical mirror for reality under the seemingly complete commodification and technological mediation of social life? Is there any real need for art and art historical scholarship even to exist today? Can the arts and humanities serve an emancipatory social agenda, and, if so, how? What role might the humanist ideals once shared by liberals and communists play in the reformulation of art and scholarship today?

This article provides a genealogy of the emergence of contemporary art practices in Armenia, arguing that the very history of emersion of these practices can be seen as a complex process of disintegration of the Bolshevik political project, particularly its agenda to base art on a subtle dialectical reconciliation between the nation and the class. After this dialectic was brutally instrumentalized by Stalinist Socialist Realism, it was attacked by the National Modernists during Khrushchev's Thaw. Later, in 1970s, from within the National Modernism itself, the first tendencies of contemporary art practices emerged. They began to challenge the conventional notions of artistic practice along the lines of a conception of art as a performative practice of liberatory subjectivization. This marked the point of the ultimate disintegration of both triumphant and tragic Bolshevik project that became a haunting specter of post-Soviet contexts.