George Soros (born 1930), a Hungarian-born businessman who accumulated his capital via hedge funds in the US the 1970s and 1980s, became interested in the struggles of eastern European dissidents around 1980 (Harms 2014, 31–32). In those years, the political climate was thawing in Hungary, and the relationships and dependencies between Hungary and First World countries were strengthened both in economic and cultural respects. This was especially true after 1982, when Hungary joined the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and, indebted in foreign currencies, the country became more dependent on its creditors. Soros started to extend his philanthropic activity onto Hungary against this backdrop. This activity was primarily manifest in the establishment and support of institutions for culture, civil society, and higher education. Even though Soros’ funding practices and liberal values posed a political threat to the state-socialist apparatus, the government—that could no longer afford generously subsidizing cultural and educational programmes—permitted him to establish philanthropic organizations as these brought valuable income in dollars, when the country was otherwise in a constant need of hard currency. Although Hungary was softening politically and ideologically, it still effectively functioned as a one-party state, and therefore offered an ideal opportunity for Soros to achieve his aim: the creation of a Popperian open society (N.v. 1999, 35).₂ As Nicolas Guilhot (2005, 15) points out, the expansion of the Soros Foundation in Hungary and its aim of spreading the idea of open society, which in this context resonated with the promises of capitalism and liberal democracy, was mainly carried out by cultural means during the 1980s.

For Soros, the visual arts were not a priority; he even stated in an interview: “I really don’t like most of the art in the centers” (Soros 1995, 125). However, as Annette Laborey, the former vice president of Soros’ Open Society Foundations argued, “Soros abhors charity . . . He works as an investor and looks for what gives the best result” (Laborey, quoted in Gardner 2015, 108). Therefore, the visual arts become important in this project not for their own sake, but because the state socialist regime prevented Soros from directly focusing his activities in the political sphere. More broadly, culture was an area where charity promised to be a good investment—in other words, charitable work could serve as an indirect political intervention. This political–philanthropic attempt was based on a sort of informal top-down logic, in which liberal democracy and market economy were promoted from “above,” primarily by intellectuals (Scheppele 1999, 23). Therefore, visual arts and the idea of contemporary art were small but inherent parts of the struggle to construct a Soros-promoted version of the open society.

While Soros came from a business background, his activity in eastern Europe was neither a business enterprise nor an interest-free donation; it was rather a conscious attempt to help create the foundations of an open society as an alternative to authoritarian forms of power-wielding in the region. Therefore, the Soros Foundation’s operation in eastern Europe was not part of a business enterprise, and in this sense, I agree with Slavoj Žižek (2009, 2) that Soros is an old type of capitalist because his business and charitable activities remain separated.

The Soros Foundation, whose mission was to support academic and cultural life, was established as part of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) in 1984. The charter ratifying a Fine Arts Documentation Center was signed by Katalin Néray, director of the Budapest Mucsarnok (Contemporary Art Center) and George Soros on April 10, 1985.₃ The work of the Documentation Center was assisted by an International Advisory Board from 1985 to 1988, which gave it an international character and the explicit aim of strengthening the international reach of the Hungarian art world. The agreement eventually registered a board of ten members: five from Hungary and five from abroad. Soros made the following Hungarian art historians members of the board: Lászlo Beke, Lóránd Hegyi, Márta Kovalovszky, Lajos Németh, and Júlia Szabó; of whom only Németh held a leading position at a local institution (Nagy 2014). This shows that most Hungarian members were chosen from a pool of professionals who might have not occupied top positions but certainly exerted intellectual influence at that time. Nevertheless, the Hungarian members were not explicitly opposed to the government; instead, their positions were comparable to those of the reform economists of the late-socialist period. Both groups seem to have been working within the state apparatus toward reforming the system from within, with the aspiration of (re)integrating their own professional field into Western institutional patterns in a technocratic way (Bockman and Eyal 2002, 310–352).

Thus, the constitution of the Advisory Board took place according to the general mode of operation of the eastern European “Soros Network” that expanded into the field of artistic production in the 1990s within the framework of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts (SCCA) (Guilhot 2007, 468). Foreign members of the board were powerful American, British, and Austrian art historians, primarily heads of esteemed museums: J. Carter Brown, Michael Compton, Thomas Messer, Meda Mládek, and Dieter Ronte. Loránd Bereczky, Director of the National Gallery and the official in charge of art history for the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP KB), was later included in the Board upon request of the Party. In order to balance the number of the Hungarian and foreign members, Jean-Cristophe Ammann was appointed a member too.₄ While the selection of the Hungarian members seems to suggest that the most thoroughly-informed and influential art historians were invited, the appointment of the foreign members with international prestige was also important. The foreign members were not hired for their knowledge about east European art. All but one of them, Mládek, held important positions in the international art world.₅ The presence of highly-qualified western members leading renowned institutions functioned as an authority-guarantee in encounters with Hungarian governmental agencies. When, during the negotiations about the Center’s establishment, Thomas Messer, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, represented Soros, his affiliation to the prestigious Guggenheim Museum greatly impressed the central figures of Hungarian cultural politics.

According to staff member Andrea Szekeres’s testimony and the Center’s archival documents, the staff of the Center arranged the collection of materials rather than authoring document entries, and provided information to visitors, mainly foreign art professionals and students (Szekeres 2012, pers. comm.). Until 1989, the Documentation Center worked as part of the Budapest Mucsarnok. During this period, their task was to document the work of about 100 artists selected primarily by the Hungarian members of the Advisory Board.6 The compiled records contained the biography of an artist, a brief summary of their work, and a list of exhibitions and publications covering their work, as well as color slides, collated and organized following the model of the Washington National Gallery’s archive. The records were arranged in a readily comprehensible format, meant to be accessible even for those who had no previous information about a given artist (Szekeres 2012, pers. comm.). This arrangement was to serve the needs of an internationally-emerging actor in the artistic scene around the same time: the curator. Nevertheless, the documentation process was neither entirely clear nor resolved. In the meetings of the Advisory Board, two—not necessarily contradictory—approaches were set against each other: the need to assist exhaustive, academic inquiry, and the creation of shorter, more clearly arranged, market- and curator-friendly documentation.

The Struggle for Cultural Hegemony

The notion of hegemony helps us better understand the relationship between the Soros Foundation and the Hungarian state in the late Kádár era, in which George Soros and his network were working on dislodging state-socialist authority and attempting to usher in a new form of social organization which they referred to as “open society.” Cultural hegemony signifies a power structure that does not exert direct political influence, but is effective on other levels, such as culture and civil society. To establish a hegemonic order, a dominant group must possess political power, but need not have total control over the dominated. The creation of a social and cultural leadership is also essential for keeping the relative freedom of the dominated in check. The notion of cultural hegemony, which was introduced by Antonio Gramsci in the early 1930s, does not refer merely to domination, but rather to intellectual and moral leadership (Gramsci 2000, 249). According to Gramsci, hegemony is based on the consent of the dominated social groups—therefore, its essence lies not only in politics, but also in civil society and intellectuals who form the “collective will” of the people (Jessop 1982, 148). Moreover, hegemony is always temporary and processual; it is inherently unstable, thus it has to be continuously remade and re-established. The Hungarian government seems to have been maneuvering between taking advantage of the money Soros invested locally and hoping to be able to neutralize, in the long run, the cultural–social values promoted by the Foundation. Thus, this particular constellation can be regarded as a war of positions between the Soros Foundation and the Hungarian state for cultural hegemony. I wish to argue here that, in this struggle, the Soros Foundation primarily sponsored an upandcoming non-Communist elite. Numerous key figures of the cultural and political counter-culture now had the opportunity for institutional backing through receiving grants or finding employment in the Foundation.

The question remains as to why the government allowed the Soros Foundation to start operation in Hungary if part of the Foundation’s declared mission was the spreading of knowledge and critical tools that could potentially contribute to destabilizing the power of the existing cultural and political hegemony. The relation between the goals of the Foundation and those of the state was paradoxical: some of their aims intersected, while others were incompatible. On the one hand, the Foundation spent large sums of money on Hungarian culture, partly in US dollars at a time when the Hungarian state was beginning to withdraw from subsidizing this area. From this point of view, their interests converged: cultural projects left underfunded by the government were now supported by the Foundation, and through this support the Foundation also gained a degree of indirect political influence in the region. On the other hand, both parties wanted either to maintain or acquire influential positions in the cultural and social spheres. The party state wanted to sustain its own dominant role even though the ideology behind it was wearing thin, whereas the Soros Foundation wished to introduce reforms based on the model of a liberal–humanitarian utopia, previously only shared by a handful of dissident intellectuals. Between 1984 and 1989, the state and the Foundation were teetering in this complicated situation however, we know that they continued cooperating because the agreement of HAS and the Foundation was never terminated.₇ How ever, hegemonic aspirations did not only present themselves in the form of financial support. The Documentation Center’s making of records was likewise a project aiming at an epistemic hegemony inasmuch the Center took over a sensitive task from the state. Of course, documentation is never neutral; as Octavian Esanu (2012, 17–18) points out, it can be a step toward acquiring power in two respects: through the possession of information, and through the selection and organization of information that creates a position of control.

In this complex struggle for cultural hegemony, the old, state-socialist technocrats and the new, typically liberal and internationally embedded cultural elites worked together within the circles of the Soros Foundation in the second half of the 1980s. A result of this cooperation was a subtle and continuous shift in power relations. As Piotrowski has argued (2009, 403–405), this also meant that no radical change took place in the Hungarian art scene in 1989, as transformation had already been underway in the 1980s and did not end in 1989. During this ongoing conflict, the participating influential intellectuals (in our concrete case, the Hungarian members of the Advisory Board) were assimilated into the emerging liberal cultural hegemony.

While in the 1980s they were condemning the ideology of the state, these intellectuals now risked compromising their critical distance by participating in the emerging hegemony of the Soros Foundation (Guilhot 2005, 14). Under state-socialism, the Hungarian intellectuals of the Advisory Board were primarily interested in gaining support for their aesthetic objectives, but did not articulate this politically. Drawing on Gramsci’s definition from the early 1930s, these board members functioned as “traditional intelligentsia” because they were not closely involved in the dissident activities of the 1980s but maintained their institutional positions. For Gramsci, traditional intellectuals primarily “think of themselves as ‘independent’, autonomous”; they are nevertheless potentially useful to any hegemonic project because “one of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing toward dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals” (Gramsci 2000, 303–304). However, the members of the Advisory Board kept to the stance of traditional intellectuals even after the political shift and during the rise of the new Soros-supported liberal hegemony. They continued to see their own position or function as one distinct from the majority of society, while they only felt responsible for the transformation of the contemporary art scene without, however, reflecting on this sphere’s broader social context. Consequently, they were primarily loyal toward the cause of contemporary art but not necessarily that of the Soros-promoted open society. Another line of thought to be explored in a subsequent study would be how this adherence, among art professionals, to a traditional apolitical intellectual ethos at the same time jeopardized the emergent liberal project that would have badly needed its own engaged, organic intelligentsia.

Power Structures Under Transformation

During the 1980s in eastern Europe and Hungary, economic dependency on capitalist countries and international organizations increased, and this circumstance fostered a rethinking of the relationship between the two sides of the Iron Curtain. In eastern Europe, intellectuals were encouraged to draw conclusions from the experiences of the capitalist world and integrate them into socialism rather than aim to outdo the Western world. This intellectual shift went hand-in-hand with the cultural implications of dual economic dependency, where both Soviet and capitalist Western expectations had to be reconciled simultaneously (Borocz 1992, 189–209). In Hungary, dual dependency became a real issue between 1987 and 1988, when neighboring socialist states pressured the Hungarian government to ban the Soros Foundation due to its advocacy of Western interests and liberal cultural politics across eastern Europe. Ultimately, however, the national economic arguments in favor of the Foundation were stronger (Nóvé 1999, 354). The concept of dual dependency applied both to the Hungarian state and to the activities of the Soros Documentation Center, which “served two masters”: it concurred with the cultural politics of the late Kádár era, and catered to the broader aspirations of the Soros Foundation as well as the needs of art professionals from western Europe and the US. There has been an enduring image both in the eastern and western European public imagination about the relation between the two halves of the continent, and this image resembles a slope. The figure of the slope is anchored in the historical perception of Eastern Europe as backward and essentially different, as continuously but unsuccessfully trying to catch-up with the western part of the continent. While this perception has been in place since the enlightenment, the thought figure of the slope experienced a revival during the Cold War (Melegh 2006, 189–191).₈ The slope connotes a situation in which every actor aims to progress as much as possible, to become as Western as possible, as it were, and adopt the apparently more civilized capitalist model. In this portrayal, Eastern Europe and the postcolonial countries bear several similarities: they all appear as “other” to Western culture, while local peoples tend to identify with a subaltern position (Chari and Verdery 2009). The activity of the Soros Foundation focused on moving the postsocialist countries upward on the slope. Its philosophy apparently reinforced the concept of the civilization slope and saw the Eastern European region as subordinate to Western countries.

From the perspective of the Soros Foundation, the project of Eastern Europe’s upward movement and catching up was a process of enlightenment that aimed to help the Hungarian elite to assimilate Western cultural patterns. These patronizing attitudes clearly manifested themselves in Meda Mládek's account, as she argued that from the beginning it was doubtful that the Soros Foundation’s steps could be successful since, in her view, Hungarian artists were fundamentally different from their western European counterparts. She wrote: “They are not patient, they want success and material advantage now, immediately. They are suddenly confronted with different possibilities and are unable to handle them . . . They are aggressive and confused.”₉ Her statement mirrors the mindset from which the concept of the civilizational scope was also conceived, and describes Eastern Europe as the counterpoint of the Western world, without a chance of catching up. Mládek’s description of the local artists echoes a widespread kind of portrayal, according to which negative Eastern European traits have always existed and are historically and biologically determined. There are similar assertions in the letters of Steven Mansbach, an American art historian specialized in east European modernism; he complains, e.g., about the slowness of compiling documentation.₁₀ In this letter, Mansbach questions the Hungarian Board’s logic for selecting artists and contrasts Western professionalism with the politically-motivated personal choices of the Eastern Europeans: “Although requested, no rationale for the selection of the artists to be documented has been provided,” and he adds his opinion: “[. . .] the selection process appears to be the result of the personal choices of a few Hungarian art critics; it does not necessarily reflect scholarly need or expectation in this country.” He even suggests a way to minimize the damage caused both by Hungarian politics and colleagues working in an unscholarly manner: “[. . .] a working committee might best be composed exclusively of western scholars and museum officials, thereby insuring both political independence from (Eastern) governmental influence, and responsiveness to the needs of western scholars and curators.”₁₁ In Mansbach’s opinion, the primary aim of the Documentation Center was to assist English speaking experts as efficiently as possible, while in its public documents the Soros Foundation always presented itself as an organization serving local interests. Mansbach’s comments also assumed that the relation between the Eastern Bloc and the West was binary, with the latter being superior: Anglo-Saxon work organization was opposed to Eastern European actors’ low level of productivity, Western intellectual independence, and impartiality to Eastern bias. Therefore, while Mládek framed Hungarian artists as underdeveloped and uncivilized, Mansbach used similar categories for writing about east European art history, while both agreed that these situations could only be improved with the help of western experts. These positions fit into a logic that, according to Boris Buden (2010, 18–25), assumes Eastern Europe to be an immature entity that should be patronized to help it catch up with Western norms and culture.

After the political transition of 1989, the Soros Foundation expanded and spread this approach to the artistic fields across the postsocialist region. With the establishment of the Soros Centers of Contemporary Arts (SCCA) network, which in their peak included twenty centers in every capital of the former Eastern Bloc, the Foundation aimed to foster not only the catch-up of Hungary but also of the entire postsocialist region to Western standards. Moreover, with SCCA, the Soros Foundation aimed to expand its hegemony project at the regional level, and established a horizontal system that networked across the postsocialist region, had transnational ambitions, and popularized similar artistic practices in every country (Gardner 2015, 108).

The scholarly methodology of the documentation process of the Budapest Center, and, later, that of the SCCA network, eventually followed US protocols. As previously mentioned, the records were to be made according to the model of the National Gallery in Washington, since it was considered to be the only globally accepted “scholarly” method of documenting the visual arts. While individual documentation was produced by Hungarian art historians, it was eventually supervised by Henry Millon from the National Gallery in Washington (Mayer 2013, pers. comm). The completed documentation gave insight into the local art scene for international researchers and gallerists without any deeper prior knowledge, and functioned as a reference for them to make grand narratives regarding eastern European art and to choose artworks for exhibitions. Thus, as a scholarly database, the Documentation Center served the interests of an asymmetrical scholarly and curatorial relationship, and similar tendencies of academic colonization were also present in other scholarly fields (Csepeli, Orkény, and Scheppele 1996, 487–510).

This asymmetry continued to exist in the 1990s, when Budapest became the hub of the SCCA network’s regional expansion. At that time, the directors of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art from every eastern European country travelled to Budapest to learn database handling. This knowledge transfer was coordinated by Suzanne Meszoly, who joined the Budapest Center in the late 1980s with a background in visual arts. Meszoly was the key figure in the introduction of the term “contemporary” in the name of the Center. She rose through the ranks and quickly became the director of the Budapest Center and the SCCA network thanks largely to her Hungarian-Australian background. Meszoly visited the freshly established SCCAs across eastern Europe to define the principles of their operation and documentation (Szekeres 2012, pers. comm.). Consequently, in the 1990s, the Soros Foundation replicated a series of unequal set-ups, now placing the Budapest Center in an intermediary, relatively privileged position.

Setting the agenda of a Western level of development as an aim did not only characterize the participants from the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Documentation Center functioned as an elite project, which was an opportunity for the internationally-connected and -oriented section of the art scene. The participating and supported Hungarian professionals expected the Soros Foundation to assist catch-up to western European and US models of contemporary art, the demand for which was already very present in the aspiring section of the local art scene in the early 1980s. Thus, the Foundation did not establish, but only reinforced, existing associations of Eastern Europe with underdevelopment, backwardness, and un-European behavior (Chari and Verdery 2009). In the 1980s, it was not only art historians, but also the majority of Hungarian artists who held an uncritically optimistic view of the West, which even Mládek found exaggerated.₁₂ She wrote to George Soros: “For them USA means success, money, western style of life which they admire without knowing and understanding it.” The oppositional intelligentsia o Hungary was a partner in setting models, proposed by the Soros Foundation, as an example, and they mostly shared the agenda of conversion to the Western institutional system of contemporary art (Esanu 2013, 173–198).

The formation of a new cultural hegemony and uneven East–West power relations amounted to more than capitalizing on the modest benefits of some little known art scenes of the periphery. The expansion of Western-type art institutions in Hungary in the 1980s and throughout eastern Europe in the 1990s led to a seamless takeover and did not incite an open conflict of interests in the transitioning (post)socialist societies. This is because the new, ideologically liberal hegemony emerged simultaneously with the crumbling of the state-socialist regime’s ideological base and with the triumph of neoliberal capitalism across the Western world. In this context, the Soros enterprise and its influence did not meet any strong resistance; rather, the values it stood for became naturalized and continued to live on as the dominant fiction of the transition period. As some of the most venerated Hungarian art historians belonged to the international networks of the Advisory Board, they, too, strengthened this fiction within their professional and intellectual circles. Thus, they and the younger and internationally more embedded artists functioned as the local faction of the transnational cadre class13 within the local scene. Therefore, their presence was actually a condition of the conversion to the Western institutional models, and, although they could profit from it, it primarily meant integration into an already formed art world with little opportunity of shaping it.

As Bockman and Eyal (2002, 310–352) argue, the positions within any network are hierarchic, and the key points are controlled by specific actors who can oversee the distribution of resources within it. Likewise, the activities of the Soros Foundation were about the extension of the international contemporary art scene’s hierarchic network into Hungary and eastern Europe with good intentions, rather than a deliberate colonization. All the participants in this network stood to gain from it. Hungarian artists and art historians got access to the international circulation of contemporary art. Moreover, the extension of their network provided them with a chance to seek additional financial support for their projects and to confirm their leading position in the local scene. At the same time, actors of the international art scene gained access to sources and materials for their research and exhibitions, and they had the opportunity to use the local sources as a base material for their projects.

For example, the SCCA network facilitated contacts and provided lists for exhibitions, such as the Manifesta Biennial (Gardner 2015, 110–111) and After the Wall: Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe that was shown in Stockholm in 1999 (Szekeres, 2012, pers. comm.). Besides serving the demand for curatorial and art historical knowledge production on east European art and shaping the local canon, an additional goal of the Soros Center was to foster the adaptation of the contemporary artistic practices. This tendency was particularly strong in the 1990s, due to the end of the state-socialist control over the Soros Foundation and thanks to Suzanne Meszoly's personal focus on contemporary art. Here, the structural preference for cutting-edge contemporary art forms adopted from western centers and the personal values of an individual intersected. This conjunction facilitated working methods, such as thematically curated exhibitions; artistic forms, such as public art and new media; and approaches, such as socially-engaged art. These methods, artistic forms, and approaches had some precedent in the state-socialist years, but they only became dominant in the 1990s, parallel to their rise in the global art world; therefore, they offered an ideal entry point to current Western tendencies. In the fostering of these new approaches in Hungary, the Soros Center played a major role, and these attitudes were manifest as early as the Polifónia/Polyphony exhibition in 1994 (Meszoly and Bencsik 1994).

This show encouraged socially-engaged and public art, while strongly dividing the local art scene (Hock 2005, 103–109), with one faction claiming that the project was only about importing Western issue-based art. The SCCA network primarily supported art projects dealing with identity, such as topics of Central European regionality, abstract politics, multiculturalism, and the internet, as the means of globalization. These projects never foregrounded identities or positions (e.g., national identity) that did not endorse the liberal agenda of the Soros Foundation; they tended to work instead within more abstract and universal frameworks (Gardner 2015,109–110).

The Soros Foundation’s framing of the Hungarian art scene as aesthetically and institutionally underdeveloped explains why, in the 1980s, its documentation practice sought Hungarian art that conformed to the international canon. While the local canon was diversified, the documentation only included tendencies that the Hungarian members of the Advisory Board considered compatible with international artistic developments: postwar modernism and abstraction, the conceptual tendencies of the 1970s, and the neo-expressionism of the 1980s.

Although in the 1980s the Soros Fine Arts Documentation Center in Budapest had to cooperate with a weakening state apparatus that hindered many of its planned projects, it could establish a Western-style canon and institutional background for contemporary art by incorporating local tendencies that conformed to this canon and model. In realizing these aims, the Foundation contributed to the collapse of the former cultural hegemony and prepared the ground for a new one that was going to be based on liberal and Western-oriented values and required the participation of intellectuals from the socialist state.₁₄ However, this new cultural hegemony, in contrast to late Cold War-era expectations, did not result in equal positions: the Hungarian artistic scene was incorporated into the uneven, hierarchic networks of the globalizing art world. While the local institutional system was restructured to foster this integration, in contrast to the expectations of catching up with the imagined West, the entry of the eastern European art scenes into the global arena merely resulted a subordinate, semiperipheral position, in which only an elite faction of the cultural field could benefit from increasing integration. As a result, in the art field a new, closely-woven mesh of dependencies and power relations has formed, which has started to function as common sense for the elite of the scene.

References

Bockman, Johanna, and Gil Eyal. 2002. “Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism.” American Journal of Sociology, 108(2): 310–352.
Borocz, József. 1992. “Dual Dependency and the Informalization of External Linkages: The Case of Hungary.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 14: 189–209.
Buden, Boris. 2010. “Children of Postcommunism.” Radical Philosophy, 159 (January/ February): 18–25.
Chari, Shara, and Katherine Verdery. 2009. “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism,
Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51(1): 6–34.
Csepeli, Gyorgy, Orkény Antal and Kim Lane Scheppele. 1996. “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in Social Science in Eastern Europe: The Colonization of East European
Social Science.” Social Research, 63(2): 487–510.
Esanu, Octavian. 2012. “What was Contemporary Art?” ARTMargins, 1(1): 5–28. 2013. Transition in Post-Soviet Art: Collective Actions Groups Before and After 1989. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press.
Gagyi, Ágnes. 2017. “Hungary’s ‘Lex CEU’ and the State of the Open Society: Looking Beyond the Story of Democratic Revolutions.” Cultures of History Forum, September 12. /cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de
Gardner, Anthony. 2015. Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Gramsci, Antonio. 2000. The Gramsci Reader. Edited by David Forgács. New York: New York University Press.
Guilhot, Nicolas. 2005. The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global Order. New York: Columbia University Press. 2007. “Reforming the World: George Soros, Global Capitalism and the Philanthropic.” Critical Sociology, 33(3): 447–477.
Harms, Viktoria. 2014. “Central Europe in Manhattan: Why Hungarian Dissidents Mattered to New York Intellectuals.” In Doing Culture under State-Socialism: Actors, Events, and Interconnections, edited by Beata Hock. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitesverlag, 4(24): 23–38.
Hock, Beáta. 2005. Nemtan és pablikart. Budapest: Praesens.
Jessop, Bob. 1982. The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods. Oxford, UK: Martin Robertson.
Melegh, Attila. 2006. On the East/West Slope: Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discources on Central and Eastern Europe. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press.
Mészoly, Suzanne and Barnabás Bencsik, eds. 1994. Polifónia: a társadalmi kontextus mint médium a kortárs magyar képzoomuuvészetben. Budapest: Soros Alapítvány Kortárs Muuvészeti Kozpont.
Nagy, Kristóf. 2014. “A Soros Alapítvány képzomuvészeti támogatásai Magyarországon: A nyolcvanas évek második felének tendenciái.” Fordulat, 21: 192–215.
Nóvé, Béla. 1999. Tény/Soros: a magyar Soros Alapítvány elso tíz éve, 1984–1994. Budapest: Balassi Kiad..
Pijl, Kees van der. 1998. Transnational Classes and International Relations. London: Routledge.
Piotrowski, Piotr. 2009. In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. London: Reaktion.
Scheppele, Kim Lane. 1999. “The Soros Empire.” In American and German Cultural Policies in Eastern Europe: Assessing Developments in the 1990s, edited by Frank Tommler. Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 18–26.
Soros, George. 1995. Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve. New York: Wiley.
Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: RSA.

Primary Sources:
Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, Budapest.
Lajos Németh Collection, Archive of the Institute of Art History, Budapest.
Published by Central European Research Institute for Art History, January 2018