The roots of this case of a speculatively temporarily oversize local art market can be found anywhere in the global

world of art. This process is marked not only of post-colonial discourses such as westernized by European influence mixed with simultaneous oversize feelings of local greatness and inferiority. Not only from an Eastern perspective can the sad fate of a large part of the artistic heritage of locally important classic works of their authors be told. Who after time provoke the interest only of a narrow group of specialists and historians or even do not move anyone any longer. It is a well-known fact that the future sometimes plays bad jokes in the world of art, regardless of geographical location. Another historically important installation critical of institutions and the art world defined by the hegemony of the Western universalistic model, but also containing a hint of its own absurd situation, concerns the story of an artist selling and exhibiting in the West while living in the South-East: 15 Nedko Solakovs Art Collector, Museum Ludwig, Budapest, 1994. 16 A black collector of contemporary art from Europe and America is living, together with his collection, in a hut in an African desert. Solakov makes use once again of his favored approach of displacing perspectives in order to obtain absurd narrative constructions and catch an unusual view on objects and people. 17 From this point of view it looks like the idea of the future museum of contemporary art is on its way to being shared between the three old art super institutions that have come about as historic, national, or foreign museum venues from the dawn of the new Bulgarian state through the end of the 19th century to late socialism: the Sofia Municipal Art Gallery, the National Art Gallery and the Bulgarian National Gallery for Foreign Art. As time proceeds, the idea that each of these existing museums broaden the interests of its collection and provide for the creation of a new department from which at a later point the new museum could branch out. The director of the National Art Gallery, Boris Danailov, has serious ambitions to define a new kind of politics and to find a new approach to the local art scene and contemporary art. In an interview with the Bulgarian Diplomatic Review 18 he expresses a position that is new for
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Here in Budapest, in 1994, working with one of my favorite curators, Katalin Neray, I did one of my favorite projects, The Collector of Art, about the great black man who lives somewhere in the African desert and collects contemporary art from Europe and America, buying his Picasso for 23 coconuts, or his early Rauschenberg for 7 antelope bones. Katalin was generous enough to let me use most of the masterpieces from the Ludwig collection to place them into the black guy's hut.) Nedko Solakov, A bitter text that ends in a joke, in: CFront Book Crossing Points East-West, 2002. Available online at <http://www.cfront.org/cf00book/en/nedko-bitter-joke-en.html>.
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The Bulgarian public met with another version of this installation in the exhibition N Forms? Reconstructions and Interpretations, 1994, SCA/Raiko Alexiev Gallery, Sofia. This Annual Exhibition of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art remains to this day the most thorough investigation and representation of the Bulgarian avant-garde and perestroika of the mid-80s, which outlined the new artistic practices and its discursive grounds on the Bulgarian art scene. Another critique of the mechanisms of the production of exotic images, imposed along with all stereotypes by an overblown entertainment industry, from an Eastern perspective is found in a text by Ekaterina Degot: [The Westerners] consider Russia an exotic rather than a western country, despite the fact that Sophie Marceau played the role of Anna Karenina. Ekaterina Degot, Lecture at the Opening of the Exhibition So Far, So Close by Olga Kisseleva, in: Passage Europe. Realities, References. A Certain Look at Central and Eastern European Art, 2004, p. 154. Of which the following excerpt shows a bold attempt by Boris Danailov to quote Harald Szeemann and sound adequate to the global processes: There is a very interesting place on the Gallerys ground floor the Chapel where exhibitions are also organized. But these are a different type of exhibitions. If the ones organized upstairs are representative, more serious events, down here we guarantee liberty and diversity of the presented authors some of them are budding young artists, others offer an alternative form of art and there are also artists who want to show something new. We are after a more dynamic rhythm, trying to keep our fingers on the pulse of todays

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