Branding the Underground: Producing Artistic Value in Late Soviet Leningrad, from the New Artists to Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe

This thesis examines how artistic value was produced within the Leningrad underground, where no art market, independent criticism, or autonomous institutional framework existed. The study reconstructs the informal mechanisms - shared spaces, networks, and symbolic capital - through which the New Artists generated recognition, then traces how this legitimacy was translated into Western market value during Perestroika through what the thesis calls an "export model" of late Soviet art. The New Academy of Fine Arts is analysed as mock-academicism: a performative institutional structure that produced real effects without state accreditation. The thesis then turns to the body. As Soviet ideology lost its hold, the heroic image of the New Soviet Man fragmented into divergent models. Within Neoacademism, artists like Georgy Guryanov preserved the monumentality of this body while stripping it of ideological content, reworking it through dandyism, eroticism, and aesthetics drawn from both Soviet visual culture and international traditions of idealised masculinity. These two lines of argument meet in the practice of Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. Where the New Artists distributed their functions across a collective, Monroe concentrated them in a single practice. Read through both art-historical and cultural-management lenses, his work reveals the body as the primary medium, the artist as a one-person brand, and the limits of a practice in which life and art became indistinguishable.