Arts in Society

Architectural Experience as Mass Deception: A Critical Look at Magyar Zene Háza

Marcell Bárdos interprets the architectural marvel of the House of Music in his native Hungary as a manifestiation of politics in aesthetics.

by Marcell Bárdos

University of Groningen

As an aspiring academic and emigrant from a country under autocratic rule—the infamous Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—I have long had a natural interest in how contemporary art is used as means of manipulation by larger social and political forces. Accordingly, I devoted this project to investigating how culture is instrumentalized in my troubled home country. I chose to focus on a building I know well, Magyar Zene Háza, or the House of Music Hungary, which is a dazzling piece of architecture located in Budapest, a futuristic golden shelter that structurally imitates nature and music.

Promotion picture of the House of Music
(https://ligetbudapest.hu/projekt/magyar-zene-haza)

The House of Music was part of a highly expensive, state-financed prestige project to build cultural venues in Városliget, the city’s oldest and largest park. Its construction was surrounded by constant controversy, yet the final product was surprisingly well-received. Today, it hosts popular events as a museum, archive, and performance hall. However, the celebratory reception and commercial success conceals the more troubling aspects of its existence.

An explicit goal of the institution’s curators and star architect, Sou Fujimoto, was staging an immersive, multisensory experience for the visitors. For this reason, and to keep the project grounded in lived experience, I started my research with a field visit: documenting and immersing myself in the building’s tangible designed space. Prior to analysis, I observed how the House of Music’s spatial elements, like its golden canopy ceiling with leaf-like geometric patterns, shape my perception.

The building’s main hall (photography Marcell Bárdos)

The golden canopy ceiling with lamps hanging like tendrils (photography Marcel Bárdos)

My experience was twofold. I felt awe and aesthetic pleasure from the futuristic yet nature-like, disorienting interior. At the same time, I sensed an atmosphere of artificiality pervading the entire space; something I termed calculated organicity. This internal tension between amazement and alienation revealed to me that my wonder was artificially engineered. I intuited that the building wanted to enchant my perception in order to obscure something else.

After my encounter, I began reflecting on my intuition, gradually uncovering a story of political deceit and corruption. Investigative reports from the Hungarian independent press exposed that the House of Music’s construction involved the destruction of cherished green spaces, the displacement of environmental protesters, and the funneling of public funds into the pockets of government-aligned businessmen. I drew on sociological studies on Orbán’s Hungary to frame these developments within the country’s broader politico-economic system. I found that the regime enforces an authoritarian form of capitalism which relentlessly accumulates wealth to the detriment of the country and its inhabitants.

To analyze the building’s social and cultural function, I used marketing and critical theory, that is, the concept of the “experience economy” and Adorno & Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry. I arrived at the argument that the House of Music functions as a brand designed to sell an experience that not only commodifies art, but also markets and legitimizes the regime that financed it. Overall, I learned that contemporary immersive architectural design easily lends itself to political instrumentalization because of its illusionistic aesthetics. It erases underlying social relations and seduces the beholder through heavy impact on the senses. In this light, the House of Music is a lens onto contemporary soft propaganda, which increasingly operates not through plain repression, but orchestrated wonder.

Dynamics in the Comics Industry

Comics have undergone many changes over time. The development of the comics publishing industry reminds of what happened in the world of pop music.

by Rudi de Vries

Comics have undergone many changes in the course of time, and the nature and popularity of comics differs enormously by country. Artists play a crucial role in this, of course, as do comic readers. However, publishers are also important: they decide whether or not they will bring comics to the market.

‘Comparative Dynamics in the Comics Industry’

One of the most striking developments in comics in recent decades is how they have evolved from a neglected, often even derided mass medium for children to a cultural artefact valued by adults in many market niches, with the potential to be perceived as legitimate works of literature and art. In a number of countries, this shift has also led to a change in the characteristics of comics publishers.

In order to gain a grip on the impact of publishers’ backgrounds, I made a division into two categories of publishers, which I have adopted from previous research. The first category consists of organisations in an adjacent sector. These are so-called de alios: often general publishers of newspapers, books or magazines, who have also published comics. The other category, de novos, concerns organisations that have focused on the product in question (here: comics) from the moment they were founded.

I collected the names of all comics publishers in the Netherlands and Belgium. In total, this involved almost 1200 publishers. I then checked for each publisher to which whether it was a de alio or a de novo comics publisher. I combined this data with a general outline of changes in the comics world, and with five case studies of French, Dutch and Belgian comics publishers.

Until the 1970s, the alios were by far in the majority, after which the novos emerged, and since the end of the 1980s the novo comic publishers have been in the majority. This runs parallel to changes in comic production: for a long time, the focus was on comic magazines, but since the 1970s this shifted to comic albums. Comic albums form the bulk of the comic supply from the mid-1980s, and the novos in particular have specialized in this.

The comics audience also changed: several segments emerged, including one with a more mature audience, who had higher demands on comics, and preferred comic albums over comic magazines. This led to more attention from the publishers for the content of the comic albums and for the creators.

Conclusions

My general conclusion is that the interaction between the alios and de novos has contributed to a different identity of the comics publishing sector, in which a one-sided focus on the market made way for a practice in which the comics themselves and their creators also received more attention.

An interesting side conclusion is that in certain branches of the cultural industry (including that of comics) it is not necessarily only large organisations that set the tone. My findings show that the policies of the usually small de novos have had consequences for the often much larger de alio comics publishers. These developments show similarities with those in pop music, where in approximately the same period small, independent record companies forced the ‘majors’ in the music industry to pay more attention to creativity-driven forms of pop music, because otherwise much new talent, and also new audiences, would pass them by.

Rudi de Vries: Comparative Dynamics in the Comics Industry; Contrasting Cultures in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. 2025. Oxon / New York: Routledge.

Our very own text book on Art Sociology has appeared!

From TikTok to Rembrandt: “Sociology about Art breaks through traditional frameworks and advocates for an art sociology that embraces both social relations and the power of the artwork itself.

Quirijn van den Hoogen

One of my tasks at the Arts, Culture and Media programme has been to introduce students to the field of art sociology providing them with the theoretical concepts they need to successfully navigate our field of study. Over the years, we have felt increasingly dissatisfied with how introductory text books describe art sociology. Therefore, we have set out to write our own text book which has now appeared in print and as e-book with Routledge. The book is titled: Sociology About Art. An Introduction to how Sociologists Study the Arts. It covers arts in all of its forms and shapes, from the fine arts, to street art, to memes and TikTok-videos, introducing all different strands of sociology.

For sociologists, making, distributing and using art and cultural products constitute social practices. This view differs from that of scholars in the humanities who traditionally pay close attention to the composition and internal meaning of art and cultural objects.

Dat het anders kan

Cultuurbeleid zoekt draagvlak in polarisatie, constateert Geert Drion. Hij introduceert een nieuw perspectief: cultuur als motor van een open samenleving, gericht op ontmoeting, schuring, ontwikkeling.

Overwegingen bij een “why” van nieuw cultuurbeleid

door Geert Drion

We zitten middenin een herijking van het cultuurbeleid. De minister, de Raad voor Cultuur, de grote fondsen en de overheden zoeken naar een nieuwe onderbouwing van het publieke belang van kunst en cultuur, manoeuvrerend in de culturele spanningen van onze tijd.

Dat leidt tot vinnige discussies, waarin het belang van de kunsten en het belang van diversiteit en inclusie tegenover elkaar lijken te staan. Kan die impasse worden doorbroken? Er is een aanknopingspunt, waarmee het cultuurbeleid terugkomt in het hart van de publieke zaak, aan de basis van de open samenleving. De sector kan daar zélf verantwoordelijkheid voor nemen.

Unfolding languages and cities: Georges Salameh in conversation with Rabab El Mouadden

Visual artist Georges Salameh navigates the Mediterranean’s dark blue waters through his multilingual lens, offering an intimate portrait of Athens before the economic crisis and reflecting on how precarity shapes both artistic expression and urban landscapes in constant flux.

Georges Salameh is a Greek-Lebanese filmmaker and visual artist. He studied Cinema in Paris at the University VIII St. Denis and since 1998 has created a series of videos, documentaries, experimental and essay films, and photographic installations. He has lived in many Mediterranean cities but is currently based in Athens. The recent book, HEAR YOU ATHENS (2021), is a correspondence between two friends who observed Athens during the period 1998-2006. In our discussion, he referred to the city as a lover. Since then, the city has changed as well as the way we experience and see it. In the following interview, Georges introduces us to his relationship with languages, the urban landscape, the crisis, and precarity through his own eyes, or even better through his lens.

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