The article attempts to conceptualize an insufficiently studied problem of the birth of new institutions. The authors forward a theoretical (logical) structure of factors and the process of institutions genesis issuing from the premise that the birth of institutions is a form of human creativity subject to its general laws. The paper singles out fundamental sociocultural prerequisites of the institution-building creativity: a crisis of old institutions and the birth of new realities requiring adequate organizational forms. The authors present necessary conditions and chains of the institution-building creativity: 1. Subjects - initiators of new institutions; 2. The existence of a creative team with a program to establish such an institution; 3. State support; 4. The perceived need (by ideology and social psychology) for institutional modernization; 5. The value-and-worldview-based vision of new institutions; 6. The concept of goals, values, functions, and the structure of future institutions; 7. A complete (specific) project of a new institution; 8. The implementation of the project: the creation and functioning of a new institution. This theoretical matrix becomes a way to comprehend the impressive historical process of institutional modernization of Russian artistic culture in the first decade of Soviet power, carried out with the decisive participation of avant-garde artists. The authors demonstrate the ideological and organizational role of the young Soviet state in initiating and implementing large-scale artistic-and-institution-building creativity and content-associated foundations of the alliance of authorities and avant-garde artists. The paper indicates the ideological prerequisites for the conscious participation of major avant-gardists in the construction of a new artistic culture and the institutional conditions for such construction (Narkompros -the People’s Commissariat of Education - and its structures). The authors also identify and reflect on basic innovative principles and essential components of the avant-gardists modernization institutional program. They show the real systemic nature and scale of practical realization of the project. This project crowned the creation of a new artistic culture as an institutional system that included institutions (museum-laboratories, art universities, research institutes, art studios and art industry enterprises) operating on the principles of artistic and scholarly innovation, democratization, decentralization and conscious social responsibility.