The aesthetics of boredom: Lithuanian photography 1980-1990

This book discusses boredom as an aesthetic category that helps to explain a tendency in late 20th c. art to focus on everyday things, avoid definite meaning or create nothing . The aesthetics of boredom result from a paradoxical situation when aesthetic experiences are created from banality the very phenomenon that artists try to escape from. Such an attitude of indifferent detachment from Soviet reality formed into a strong artistic statement in Lithuanian photography of the 1980s when photographers not only represented the boring existence in the USSR, but also emphasised the banality of environment and emptiness of space through visual monotony. They replaced the decisive moment with chance and tried to slow the time of the photograph thus focusing on the value of the eventless present moment.