Connoisseurs and commuters

The only thing that's really changed in the last 16 years is the lights. On Moscow's fabled metro network, the magnificent lights now emit a bleached neon glow. Discounting, of course, the increased fare and other such mundanes.

As an Artwalk, the Metro is the body, the soul and the heart of Moscow dissected and laid out bare. Try going to the Komsomolskaya Metro and be stunned by the sheer display of art. In the bowels of this great city are magnificent mosaics, sculpture, frescoes, paintings, chandeliers, banisters, carvings. You'll find them on the pillars, walls, sides of platforms and stairs.

Switch to Washington, DC. It has a metro network too, built about 30 years after the grand project of Moscow. On both sides, there's just sad grey cement, punctuated by monotonous advertisements. The only art, in the most conventional sense, I've ever seen has been in the form of advertisements for exhibitions.

Both cities boast of a great art collection that is likely to satisfy most appetites. In Moscow, there is the unrivalled Tretyakov Gallery, while Washington has its National Gallery of Art, among many others. Why then did they choose to create public interiors so diverse?

The simplest explanation lies in the divergent history of these two cities. Moscow has been a city of power, wealth, and therefore, of the patrons of the arts. Not so DC, which, for a long time, was a city you had to escape from over the weekends. It's a city built to govern, to exercise political power.

Few ever saw themselves as part of this city. Besides, throbbing New York is just a couple of hours away. The arts here never grew organically from the corners. The Smithsonian enterprises, for example, were created. The difference in the self-perception in these two cities isn't the only explanation.

I believe the stark difference is because of how differently each of the cultural contexts imagines art making. A common explanation is that Stalin ordered all that art to inject a healthy dose of nationalistic fervour into the suffering Soviet citizens.

But as we ought to know, nothing Stalin ever forced was robust after force was withdrawn. The Metro goes deeper into the Russian (rather than Soviet) psyche than we realise.

The Russians were discussing art at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the middle of that century, art was not a pretty picture, but at the heart of intense discussions. And by the early decades of the twentieth, you can already see clues in the works of celebrated artist Rodchenko.

Although many remember him as the photomontage artist, Rodchenko engaged with the Soviet state with the greatest passion. He designed posters, bringing art out to the general public. We know Rodchenko because he's just so well known.

But given he worked with the state, he would have reflected some of the spirit of the times. There were surely others "" including those who funded or designed the metro "" who shared his vision. Not surprising then that till the 1990s Moscow had large graphic art works on public walls. And that's the explanation for the tale of the two metros.

The Moscow Metro is a manifestation "" a grand one at that "" of the way art and its audiences have been long constructed in that city and its culture. Everyone was seen as intrinsically capable of enjoying the arts without being trained for it.

For that reason, it was placed within their everyday reach. This acknowledgement of the essential human ability to engage with the world of ideas makes visitors to Russia gasp when they come face to face with it. And thinking of it, in all the hundreds of times.

I took the Metro, I never once heard a Russian treat any of it as a bagful of special goodies. Art is part of everyday life here.