Comment by ericmay
11 hours ago
It’s ideologically related and, unfortunately with our McDonald’s level standards of art and culture it passes for something akin to artwork.
You’ll find Flower Thrower at your local IKEA or hung in the bathroom of Chipotle. They wouldn’t be caught dead hanging actual art from, say, Renoir though. The focus is to destroy originality, destroy individuality, destroy religion, and promote sterilization (not of people, though of course in some cases authoritarian ideologies like this do promote such insanity) and mass production.
It’s all the same communist ethos. Not everyone agrees, and you’re certainly free to disagree of course, it’s just my opinion.
Your second paragraph sounds like you're using IKEA and Chipotle as the measure of whether something is communist. You're putting corporatism on the same side as communism. At a minimum, that's not a historically accurate standard.
I've seen the difference between communist art and non-communist (or at least post-communist) art, at a Russian Impressionism art gallery in Park City, Utah. There were all these paintings of the steppes - brown and green grass blowing in the wind. But the difference was, in the paintings from after 1990, you'd see these tiny bright bits of red. They were painting the same steppes, but after the fall of communism, they also painted the flowers, not just the grass.
> Your second paragraph sounds like you're using IKEA and Chipotle as the measure of whether something is communist. You're putting corporatism on the same side as communism. At a minimum, that's not a historically accurate standard.
Apologies if that was your interpretation of my comment as that wasn't my intention, and certainly not my belief. It's a bit like trying to figure out if Bitcoin is money or a store of value or something else. The art styles, well lack of them, and the blandness of the buildings is less about corporatism (which is more appropriately captured in Suburbia - fragile supply chains, government grid planning) and more about how communism and similar ideologies suppress individuality.
The reason it's a bit hard to parse is because corporate America is the instrument in which some of these ideologies are expressed. It's not the source of them which is easy to confuse. To a large extent corporations just give the people what they want at a profit. In my view.
> They were painting the same steppes, but after the fall of communism, they also painted the flowers, not just the grass.
I think that's a really good way insight (I've never seen the paintings just going off of your comment). You can see how communism suppressed artistic vision and creativity because, as you are aware, with authoritarian ideologies you have to suppress expression since it's dangerous to the established regime.
Your rant seems confused from an art history point of view.
I think we should talk about the Bauhaus and where they were coming from. Industrial mass production allowed for cheaply mass produced ornaments during Historicism. To me it is easily understandable why the Bauhaus wanted to find a different approach to how to deal with industrialization and how to incorporate it into architecture, going away from mere imitation and copying. I think it’s extremely fascinating that those ideas took root in the Soviet Union (creating utilitarian living spaces on a mass scale) and the USA (office buildings).
Many contemporary artists, however, have very little or nothing to do with Bauhaus and its ideas at all. There is just no link connecting them … and while the Soviet Union did employ industrialized mass production to build living spaces without ornaments its art was more often than not Socialist Realism, which is a different beast altogether.
But I do recommend you read Asylum for the Homeless by Adorno because I think you might like it: “Actually one can no longer dwell any longer. The traditional dwellings, in which we grew up, have taken on the aspect of something unbearable: every mark of comfort therein is paid for with the betrayal of cognition; every trace of security, with the stuffy community of interest of the family. The newly functionalized ones, constructed as a tabula rasa, are cases made by technical experts for philistines, or factory sites which have strayed into the sphere of consumption, without any relation to the dweller: they slap the longing for an independent existence, which anyway no longer exists, in the face.”
You criticise the previous poster for seeing Communism everywhere and then recommend them a book by Adorno, a dyed in the wool red. That will confuse 'em.
https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/