Interview with Yana Tibben
CEO and Founder of Art Catch - online gallery and cultural hub

In order to be successful in the art world, you need to be dynamic, fluent in languages, open-minded, and have an extensive network of international contacts. You also definitely need to feel the time and have a keen intuition. All these qualities are possessed by our today's interlocutor...
- Yana, you have a very interesting mix of business and art background, please tell us how started your "journey" with art?


- My personal interests have always been connected with art, since the moment in my childhood when I came across an album of Bosch's reproductions and those of the collection of Tretyakov Gallery. I always wanted to study art history but it was a terrible crisis of 1998 in Russia when I graduated from school and had to choose a university, so my parents said it'd be an economic suicide to do humanities. So I studied international economics and afterwards built my career in business consulting. But my heart was never with this job. I think only my perfectionism allowed me to succeed in this field. At some point, approaching my 30th year, I had to take a decision whether to invest all my time and energy into penetrating the highest positions in my profession or start doing what I really wanted to do in life. For me it was the moment "now or never", and I chose for my life-long passion by going to study art history abroad. It was pretty scary to start everything from scratch, it was a real downshifting, considering people in Russia start building careers at quite a young age. Studying was one of the best periods in my life as I was learning the subject that I truly loved. Approaching the end of my masters I was questioning myself, what I was going to do after. I had no connections in the art world at all. But, from my experience, if you follow the right path, you get help – absolutely accidentally I met Dmitry Khankin – a partner of Triumph gallery, one of the biggest contemporary art galleries in Russia. We talked, he appreciated my business background (which I thought to be a shame), international education and offered me a position of a curator. Soon, I continued as a chief curator and took this position for almost five years. By the way, my business experience helped me a lot later on.
- What is it - Art Catch and why did you decide to launch it?


I moved to the Netherlands 2,5 years ago and again I faced the same question as 10 years ago: what's next? It was hard for me to change the country and quit my favourite job, though it happened for family reasons. But just as with my business background, I decided to turn these circumstances into something positive. From my experience in the international art field I know how hard it is to make Russian artists visible abroad. It happens for many reasons: difficult logistics, limited budgets, poor institutional support, negotiation skills and even lack of English. There is an interest from art institutions, but many good projects failed due to these reasons. I started thinking of what I could do from my side, being here, to try to change the situation. So, first the idea of an online gallery was born with some selection of artworks from the artists I know. As i was working on the website, the concept developed into something bigger: publishing activity, logistics, research, career center. And of course the viewing room. I call it a hub!


Nirvana does Top of the Pops performance, where, not allowed to play live, they just show off all over the place. And as the UK youth saw this happening, they did not exactly fall in love with Grunge, but rather got the idea for their own attitude of the next decade. "The Scene That Celebrates Itself", as they call it, was finding its way.
Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole. In the words of Jan Tschichold, "methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve, have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied."
Front matter, or preliminaries, is the first section of a book, and is usually the smallest section in terms of the number of pages. Each page is counted, but no folio or page number is expressed, or printed, on either display pages or blank pages.

"Our current state sucks. Let's look for something interesting in the past. Let's pretend the past is still here."
1993
First Acknowledgement
Suede make it to the magazine cover
It was this issue of the Select magazine that stated that Britpop is a thing. It featured Suede, The Auteurs, Denim, Saint Etienne and Pulp. No Blur and no Oasis yet.
Suede were one of the first bands to establish themselves in this new genre. They set the guidelines for everyone to follow. As the journalist
John Harris wrote, "If Britpop started anywhere, it was the deluge of acclaim that greeted Suede's first records: all of them audacious, successful and very, very British"
1994
April 1994
Blur release their third studio album, Parklife
The singles include:

1. "Girls & Boys"
Released: 7 March 1994
2. "To the End"
Released: 30 May 1994
3. "Parklife"
Released: 22 August 1994
4. "End of a Century"
Released: 7 November 1994

"Blur went from being regarded as an alternative, left field arty band to this amazing new pop sensation"
— Graham Coxon, |Blur
August 1994
Oasis releases their debut album, Definitely Maybe
The singles include:

1. "Supersonic"
Released: 11 April 1994
2. "Shakermaker"
Released: 13 June 1994
3. "Live Forever"
Released: 8 August 1994
4. "Cigarettes & Alcohol"
Released: 10 October 1994
5. "Rock 'n' Roll Star"
Released: May 1995 (US radio single)
"We don't want to be an indie band from England who've had a couple of hits. We want to go on and be an important band and there's certain things you've got to do."
— Noel Gallagher, Oasis
1995
Young British Artists
Damien Hirst gets Turner prize for a divided cow
The similar go-get-'em moods dominate the art scene. Young British Artists, led by Damien Hirst, are making art as outrageous as possible. In 1995, Hirst himself gets the Turner Prize (the most prestigious prize in Fine Arts) for "Mother and Child (Divided)" - the installation consisting of a cow and a calf, divided in halves and put in tanks of formaldehyte.
Sarah Lucas' Self Portrait and "I'm Desperate" by Gillian Wearing

COMMON PEOPLE

1996
The anthem on air
She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge
The song Common People released by Pulp in 1996 is voted a Britpop anthem. In a 2012 question and answer session on BBC Radio 5 Live Cocker said that he was having a conversation with the girl at the bar at [Central Saint Martins] college because he was attracted to her, although he found some aspects of her personality unpleasant. He remembered that at one point she had told him she "wanted to move to Hakney and live like 'the common people'"
Written by Natasha Savicheva
All rights for images and videos belong to their authors.
Further materials
Film
Live Forever - The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop
Hilarous documentary about the Britpop music scene in the Nineties, featuring all the main bands of the scene exposing the truth behind the myths.
Interview
Oasis from the archives: Noel in 1994
Just before the release of Definitely Maybe, Caspar Llewellyn Smith caught up with Noel Gallagher to find out about scraps with Liam, spats with Suede and why people would still be listening to his band's debut album in 20 years' time.
Website
Britpop at the BBC: Class of '94
BBC celebrates the 20th anniversary of Britpop with series of special programs and features.