Vladimir Putin’s Waning Tolerance for Art

At a recent contemporary-art exhibition I attended in the town of Asbest, in the Ural mountains east of Moscow, residents puzzled over the meaning behind an installation featuring a children’s playground. The video explaining the art’s meaning did not work, so visitors grasped for clues. Individual knots along some of the metal rods could hint at barbed wire, one suggested. Might this be a nod at the local region’s once-closed towns, a reference to the Urals’ secret Soviet-era industrial and scientific centers where information was strictly controlled, or perhaps even to growing restrictions in modern Russia?

Asbest, so named for its role as the world’s biggest producer of asbestos, is a bleak place with crumbling infrastructure, and is defined by the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mine. Young couples on their wedding day pose for photographs by