dear list:
I agree with Grant: explain this ominous insinuation.
And, if I can recommend an interesting and unexpected analysis of the
relationship of the Soviet vanguard and Stalin see:
Boris Groys, "Stalinism as an Aesthetic Phenomenon," in Tekstura:
Russian Essays on Visual Culture, edited and translated by Alla
Efimova and Lev Manovich, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
1993), pp 115 - 151.
Groys suggests that it was the far reaching ambition of the
avant-garde that made it a target of Stalin. Specifically, the
Constructivists, Productivists and Engineerists in particular were
suppressed because of their overtly expressed desire to create a new
society that was 1. organized along the lines of their own, radical
art practice and 2. in which art as a unique profession dissolved
into the masses and into daily life.
However, this is hardly a formula for some lock-step cabal leading
the sheepish masses and backed up by terror and follows along the
lines proposed by the young marx and engles in the German Ideology:
"The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular
individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up
with this, is a consequence of division of labour. ... In a
communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in
painting among other activities." - g. sholette
--
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There must be interference, crossing of borders and obstacles, a
determined attempt to generalize exactly at those points where
generalizations seem impossible to make---we need to think about
breaking out of the disciplinary ghettos in which as intellectuals we
have been confined, to reopen the blocked social processes ceding
objective representation (hence power) of the world to a small
coterie of experts and their clients, to consider that the audience
for literacy is not a closed circle of three thousand professional
critics but the community of human beings living in society, and to
regard social reality in a secular rather than a mystical mode,
despite all the protestations about realism and objectivity.
Edward Said
gregory g. sholette
gshol-*at*artic.edu
http://www.artic.edu/~gshole/