Mission

Causa Artium brings you into the inner workings of all the arts: music, literature, the visual arts, drama, cinema, performance art, dance, poetry and more. Today, people "in the arts scene" dash from one of a myriad of art events to another. But the entertainment is fleeting—a recent study at the Louvre, in which visitors were found to spend all of five seconds, on average, with a single artwork, is all too telling a sign of the times. But art does not live as a check-list of things to be glanced at and passed by. Causa Artium works to return to us the gift of a genuine connection with a work of art, of depth rather than breadth, of active, curious and skillful engagement with the constructs of creative human minds.

Causa Artium organizes events, public art projects and happenings (such as The Festival of Russian Arts, What Is(n't) Art, Histories, Brands & Illusions, The Urban Paradise) that open the inner workings of artworks to our audiences. We also put the spotlight on art worthy of special attention (R+R, Markson/Lowry, BookArt), bring little-known art to light (The New Russian Literature or Nikolai Makarov-Contemporary Primitivist) and illuminate the contexts without which art cannot be understood (R+R). Causa Artium also promotes the more profound academic investigation of art and artistry through conferences, research projects, university talks, and more (Oral History of Russian Nonconformism).

All Causa Artium projects are enhanced by enlightening and practically useful conversations with and talks by artists and experts, by audio recordings and visual projections, by catalogues, interviews and articles, and through many other means of providing our audiences with the tools to access what artworks have to offer, to penetrate into what makes them tick.

Vision

Causa Artium sees an artwork as a weaving together of parts to make a complex and coherent greater whole.

And as the most sophisticated of communicative acts, artworks call each viewer to invest efforts of mind and spirit to follow its weavings and unriddle its meanings.

It is this process, where we engage that single work so deeply that our interest grows with our understanding, that is of the essence.

Only when we do this can artworks be truly said to live.

Causa Artium has a vision of a world where more lives are enriched by this sort of human, in the highest sense of the word, interaction.

Art is one of the ways people communicate with one another. Every work of art brings the viewer to into a special kind of relationship, both with whoever has created or is creating the art and also with everyone else who—together with him, or before or afterwards—is subject to that
artistic impression.
—Leo Tolstoy

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power
to an inborn talent.
In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome, requiring an effort.
—Henri Matisse

Art is so varied that to reduce it to any single purpose, be it even the salvation of mankind, is an abomination before the Lord.
—Nikolai Gumilev

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work,
is what makes all the difference in art.
—Dante Gabriel Rosetti

Art is art.
Everything else is everything else.
—Ad Reinhardt

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance…
and I know of no substitute whatever
for the force and beauty of its process.
—Henry James

It's not what you look at that matters,
it's what you see.
—Henry David Thoreau