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The etymological kinship of the word amateur with the Latin amator (one who loves again and again) makes it possible to view art as a widely accessible cultural practice. Without seeking perfection or competitive status, the amateur takes prolonged delight in the chosen activity, thus giving substance to the idea of the anti-bourgeois artist. Examining the art worlds of mid to late Socialism necessitates considering so called,parallel spheres of action' - those that lie in between official and unofficial art. In this article I examine three artists-organisers and compare their cultural practice: Jiří Valoch, Milan Adamčiak and Július Koller. Each of them comes from a different field - while Valoch was poet and exhibition maker, Adamčiak a musicologist and action artist, Koller's point of departure was painting. What connects them all is that they were engaged in amateur art. Their continuum of eeducational activity was not revolutionary, and indeed it was not even entirely oppositional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a review of Adriena Šimotová's first independent exhibition at the Czechoslovak Writers Gallery (Galerie Československý spisovatel) in 1965, Jiří Šetlík described the painter's work as ‘the living flower of the Prague spring of exhibitions'. This phrase symbolises the starting point from which in the middle of the 1970s, after a personal tragedy, her art turned in a different and qualitatively new conceptual and material direction and she began creating textile collages, with interpersonal communication as its subject matter, and then paper reliefs. How much did the newly emerging generation of private collectors of contemporary art and art museums respond to the body of work she created between 1965 and 1980? Among the first figures to fully appreciate Šimotová's art as a collector were gallery-owner Meda Mládková and poet Jiří Kolář. Important textile collages from Šimotová's groundbreaking The Definition of Man (Vymezení člověka) cycle (1977) became part of the collections of Jiří Valoch and Milan Weber. One of the first large-scale paper reliefs was acquired by architect Josef Chloupek. These individuals also organised local shows during this difficult time when her work could not be exhibited in any major centre. Although public art museums began acquiring her work earlier, they focused conservatively on her more traditional work as a painter in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]