Kristóf Nagy

This ongoing research cluster examines power dynamics within late-socialist art and culture across Eastern Europe, moving beyond simple binaries of power versus dissent. Rather than focusing exclusively on ideology or artists' heroic self-narratives, I investigate the political economy of cultural production: how economic structures shaped both cultural infrastructures and artistic output, and how seemingly national developments were embedded in broader global processes—particularly the emerging neoliberalization of the late-socialist art field. Key publications explore how Western art patronage and artists' own pro-market practices transformed the cultural landscape of 1980s Hungary.

The widest-reaching outcome was the exhibition Left Turn, Right Turn – Artistic and Political Radicalism of Late Socialism in Hungary (co-curated with Márton Szarvas, 2019) and its accompanying publication. Rather than romanticizing artistic radicalism, we analyzed how factors like class position and economic crises drove the Orfeo and Inconnu Groups toward far-left and far-right political radicalizations, while creating a community space for artists and activists to reflect on their trajectories.

Currently I am working on three edited volumes exploring these dynamics: Exhibitions and Criticism: Artistic Discourses in the 1980s (with Júliusz Huth, 2025) examines how art debates reflected market liberalization; Selling Art in Socialism (with Lynn Rother and Gregor Langfeld) studies socialist art markets and their tensions with anti-capitalist utopia; and with Katja Praznik I am editing the Politics and Ideology section of The Cultural History of the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe project.

My critical study of dissident and alternative practices naturally led to examining how dominant forms of art and cultural production operate. Since 2018, I have investigated how Viktor Orbán's regime has transformed cultural production in Hungary on the ruins of the pre-existing liberal hegemony.

In 2018, with Emilia Barna, Márton Szarvas, and Mária Madár, we authored a pioneering study on the cultural politics of Orbán's regime, demonstrating how its position on the global periphery produces not homogenous nationalist culture, but a hybrid formation combining ethnonationalist and globally recognized cultural forms. This regime exploits cultural producers' vulnerable conditions through a mixture of coercive and consensual measures.

Building on this foundation, I have conducted ethnographic and historical research on the regime's most contested cultural flagship: the Hungarian Academy of Arts. This work resulted in a series of articles examining the institution's history, ideology, and civil society-shaping power, culminating in my PhD dissertation Waging Art: Hungary's Academy of Arts and the New Culture Wars in Times of Hegemonic Shifts (Central European University, 2025).

Currently, I am developing this analysis into a book that reframes "culture wars" as alliances between emergent political-economic elites seeking to advance their position in capital accumulation and segments of the artistic community aiming to avoid economic deprivation.

Labor conditions and solidarity-based resource management form crucial threads throughout my scholarship. I bring a labor perspective to understanding right-wing cultural politics' success while excavating past experiments that attempted to bring commoning into cultural production.

Recent work includes an analysis of the 1940s People's Colleges Movement, which sought to create revolutionary intellectuals from peasant youth without either idealizing or rejecting peasant culture. In my study of Hungary's Academy of Arts, artists' labor conditions are central to explaining the institution's power.

These concerns extend beyond scholarship into practice. In 2020 I co-authored the first overview of commoning culture in Hungarian (with Virág Buka), and in 2021 I co-organized the Commoning Art and Culture summer school (with Alexandra Kowalski and Márton Szarvas), creating spaces for artists and cultural workers to explore alternative modes of organization.