fascists and communists are united in their hatred of "degenerate" art, so i'm fine with it. if exposing the citizens of the USSR to Modern American art advanced the fall of the soviet union then w/e, if it also happened to give Rothko money to paint then that's a solid win.— cognitohazard (@bryanarchyNOW) June 3, 2021
Socialist Realism kinda sucks ass, people aren't just dumb sheep that dont understand or value art unless it's the most two dimensional portrayal of working class shit ever. It keeps being praised in leftist spaces and just, you dont have to love something just cause it was done in a socialist country, same shit with people who only listen to big orchestral leftist anthems or "guy with an acoustic guitar that sings about class struggle". Yes these people exist I have known too many.
Socialist Realism kinda sucks ass, people aren’t just dumb sheep that dont understand or value art unless it’s the most two dimensional portrayal of working class shit
Geez I just like painting of swole dudes driving tractors and shit, give me a break man
Thats fine but officializing it as like "proletarian art" is at best patronizing and at worst ends up paralleling nationalist propaganda and art, the art in itself isnt "bad" or whatever but the thought behind it definitely has a lot of bad ideas to it.
Constructivism was bad ass and it sucks that it was ignored in favor of socialist realism.
There was a huge amount of artistic creativity flowing out of the Soviet bloc anyways, even with the state sanctioned realism. Which didn't even last that long, just look at the posters here. Socialist Realism was the Greco-Roman domes and columns of the Soviet bloc. Just an artistic choice for state stuff and not something that was necessarily pervasive outside that.
I'm getting Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge for my wall alongside a Van Gogh but even being a modernism nerd Soviet art by and large is just kind of eh to me. It did some interesting things in terms of intentionally flipping class dynamics in art, but that wasn't a novel idea and the works themselves usually aren't interesting. Compared to some of the other 1930s-40s movements, it's nothing I would uphold as the future of modernism.
Prolekult was from the same era as Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. That's where I really like Soviet art, when it was a political revolution on top of modernism's perspective revolution. The hell of the 40s seemed to mostly stop that. I think nonconformist art is neat in the same way that Marcel Duchamp is one of my favourite artists, but it's such an internal dialogue between the artist and the Soviet state that it doesn't have the same sense of universal relevancy that other movements do. I can still be a dadist and consider Hexbear to be dada in forum form even if none of us lived through World War 1. Maybe it's just ignorance but I can't similarly put myself in the shoes of a 1950s-70s Soviet artist responding to a state that's completely foreign to me and a project I lost faith in with Khrushchev.
The nonconformists are pretty good (and I think that Picasso or Stravinsky's work is as much of an internal dialogue with the west as the non-conformists' is), but I was also thinking of the populist neo-futurist art of the 50s-60s. Khrushchev may well have doomed the union, but the art of the Soviet high water mark has such a sense of optimism and merges the modernist and Soviet Realist trends quite effectively, I think.
Socialist Realism kinda sucks ass, people aren't just dumb sheep that dont understand or value art unless it's the most two dimensional portrayal of working class shit ever. It keeps being praised in leftist spaces and just, you dont have to love something just cause it was done in a socialist country, same shit with people who only listen to big orchestral leftist anthems or "guy with an acoustic guitar that sings about class struggle". Yes these people exist I have known too many.
Geez I just like painting of swole dudes driving tractors and shit, give me a break man
Thats fine but officializing it as like "proletarian art" is at best patronizing and at worst ends up paralleling nationalist propaganda and art, the art in itself isnt "bad" or whatever but the thought behind it definitely has a lot of bad ideas to it.
Constructivism was bad ass and it sucks that it was ignored in favor of socialist realism.
There was a huge amount of artistic creativity flowing out of the Soviet bloc anyways, even with the state sanctioned realism. Which didn't even last that long, just look at the posters here. Socialist Realism was the Greco-Roman domes and columns of the Soviet bloc. Just an artistic choice for state stuff and not something that was necessarily pervasive outside that.
One of my favorites from that album
And this
And this
More
Kinda SR, but I still like it
I'm getting Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge for my wall alongside a Van Gogh but even being a modernism nerd Soviet art by and large is just kind of eh to me. It did some interesting things in terms of intentionally flipping class dynamics in art, but that wasn't a novel idea and the works themselves usually aren't interesting. Compared to some of the other 1930s-40s movements, it's nothing I would uphold as the future of modernism.
:party-sicko:
I think there's still some interesting things, especially Proletkult and some of the 60s era space stuff.
Prolekult was from the same era as Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. That's where I really like Soviet art, when it was a political revolution on top of modernism's perspective revolution. The hell of the 40s seemed to mostly stop that. I think nonconformist art is neat in the same way that Marcel Duchamp is one of my favourite artists, but it's such an internal dialogue between the artist and the Soviet state that it doesn't have the same sense of universal relevancy that other movements do. I can still be a dadist and consider Hexbear to be dada in forum form even if none of us lived through World War 1. Maybe it's just ignorance but I can't similarly put myself in the shoes of a 1950s-70s Soviet artist responding to a state that's completely foreign to me and a project I lost faith in with Khrushchev.
The nonconformists are pretty good (and I think that Picasso or Stravinsky's work is as much of an internal dialogue with the west as the non-conformists' is), but I was also thinking of the populist neo-futurist art of the 50s-60s. Khrushchev may well have doomed the union, but the art of the Soviet high water mark has such a sense of optimism and merges the modernist and Soviet Realist trends quite effectively, I think.