The art of the totalitarian regimes as a social phenomenon : (Towards the sociology of aesthetisation of fear and evil)
2006
Abstract
The artifacts of the totalitarian regimes, mostly - with a distinctive exception of Italy - aesthetically homomorphic, do not constitute an aesthetic value: they constitute an aesthetic norm, which is stregthened by power tools and becomes a part of the dominant ideology (in the sense of Gramsci's "hegemony"). Socialist realism as one form of the art of totalitarianism is described as a social fact conditioned by time.
Then its functions are analysed (legitimisation, translation, persuasion) and the evidence is produced for the fact that an academic realism is not specific only for the totalitarian regimes: it is a product of all state-run and official art (including the democratic one).