
When Art Meets Power - prismatic
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/08/when-art-meets-power-russia-revolution/
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SFJulie
Art meeting Power is the rule, not the exception.

Art at best is critique, and as with the street art, art finished behind
closed walls once it got bankable, and for rap, punk, comics, even worse
emasculated.

And NY books forget all these country like France where like in the USSR,
IIIrd Reich, mussolinian Italy there are still a minister of the Culture to
tell the people what is the right Culture for them. To be an artist, don't
piss the government else you lose funding and possibility to
expose/sing/dance/perform.

And modern website design, is looking like the Nazi propaganda with their
always clean looking smiling workers thinking of a brighter future shaped in
the form of the ideal society.

It is creepy how we can see what was wrong in the past but suffer short sight.

~~~
xapata
Are you saying art is best when it is a critique? Or are you saying art is, at
best, merely a critique instead of a creation?

Either way, I disagree. It's inappropriate to impose a single continuum of
quality onto all art.

~~~
SFJulie
Art is in the form we know, at least a critique of the form of art preceding
it.

Else, art would be encrusted with either a stochastic form, or a fixed point
that would never be evolving.

Art being related to craftsman like building where technique are evolving I
see nothing shocking in my assertion. Art is like progress in craftsmanship it
always questions the past best practices.

Hence, coding is pure Art!

~~~
xapata
> a critique of the form of art preceding it.

That's a very generous definition of "critique". I hung a little bit of cloth
from Guatemala on my wall. Is that a critique of centuries of textiles?

I suppose we can make a distinction between fine arts and decorative arts. I
find that boundary line very difficult to draw.

