Mid-Morning Open Thread

Icebergs and Wreck in Sunset
Frederic Edwin Church

I have been poking around the art produced by artists in the "school" called "Socialist Realism." I put school in quotations because the word has connotations of serious art, and I couldn't find more than a few examples of anything I would consider uplifting or original or aesthetically pleasing in my artistic sense. Much of what I saw was technically proficient, and some showed pleasant and interesting scenes, but the subtext was always so obvious, and the not-so-metaphorical 7 grams of lead if the artist wasn't sufficiently adaptable to the current socialist orthodoxy was always on my mind.

What does this have to do with the artwork above, or for that matter anything in particular in the news? Nothing, other than the inescapable fact that freedom echos throughout society, and touches everything.

Hey...it's a new year. Let me wax grandiloquent for a few days.

posted by CBD at 09:30 AM

| Access Comments