This week, according to Professor Dave Beech, “…Socialist Realism was an art of the people not despite being official state art but because of it. Greenberg was wrong to equate Socialist Realism to kitsch because this conflates ‘the people’ with ‘the masses’ and therefore the state with the market. The Soviet Avant-guard allied itself to the working class rather than the people by inserting itself into industry whereas Soviet posters asigned ‘the people’ a revolutionary role.”
He continues…”A public is a specific social formation that contests the values that form it in the first place. Neither markets nor state produce a public. Consumers have cash, voters have votes, but members of a public have opinions, make judgements and hold values that they express through discursive interactions not only through publishing well made arguments but also through applause, heckling, chanting and booing.”
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