It was joined by artists who were actively involved in underground exhibitions, in the design of concerts for the group Kino, in the filming of «ASSA», and working with the orchestra «Popular Mechanics». They were all united in their belief in the Russian avantgarde and in Western modernism. They wanted change. Contemporary Western art, full of cynicism and boredom, disappointed many followers of this movement, so these artists decided to oppose the «comic» postmodernism, the sarcastic and corrosive nature of contemporary culture, and they appealed to the eternal values of classical art, creating the New Academy of Fine Arts in December 1989. Timur Novikov became the Academy's founder and its theorist. Neo-academists, who later called themselves neoclassicists, aspire to revive classical traditions in painting, graphics, and sculpture, but at the same time they actively use new media – photography, video, computers, all the latest technology. In the traditions of neoacademism, organizations celebrate with exhibitions, concerts, poetry readings and masked balls in the best palaces of Petersburg. The artists pay serious attention to the theory of art, publishing articles and manifestos (e.g. in the magazines «Decorative Arts» and «Artistic Will»), they study classical languages, research forgotten technologies, including the forgotten technique of silverless photo printing from the 19th century. They reveal the secrets of the old masters, and they can be found in libraries, museums, conservatories and archives.