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Educating the Masses
art, whereas the avant-garde investigates artistic devices. 6 Accordingly, Greenberg
placed the Socialist Realism of the Stalin era, as well as other forms of
totalitarian art, on a par with the commercial mass culture of the West. Both,
he averred, aimed to exert the maximum effect on their audiences, rather than
engaging critically with artistic practices themselves. For Greenberg, the
avant-garde ethos thus entailed a distant and critical attitude toward mass
culture. But in fact, the artists of the classical European and Russian avantgarde
were very much attracted to the new possibilities offered by the mass
production and dissemination of images. The avant-garde actually disapproved
of only one aspect of commercial mass culture: its pandering to mass
taste. Yet modernist artists also rejected the elitist “good” taste of the middle
classes. Avant-garde artists wished to create a new public, a new type of
human being, who would share their own taste and see the world through
their eyes. They sought to change humankind, not art. The ultimate artistic
act would be not the production of new images for an old public to view with
old eyes, but the creation of a new public with new eyes.
Soviet culture under Stalin inherited the avant-garde belief that humanity
could be changed and thus was driven by the conviction that human
beings are malleable. Soviet culture was a culture for masses that had yet to
be created. This culture was not required to prove itself economically—to be
profitable, in other words—because the market had been abolished in the
Soviet Union. Hence the actual tastes of the masses were completely irrelevant
to the art practices of Socialist Realism, more irrelevant, even, than they were
to the avant-garde, since members of the avant-garde in the West, for all their
critical disapproval, had to operate within the same economic conditions as
mass culture. Soviet culture as a whole may therefore be understood as an
attempt to abolish that split between the avant-garde and mass culture that
Greenberg diagnosed as the main effect of art operating under the conditions
of Western-style capitalism. 7 Accordingly, all other oppositions related to
this fundamental opposition—between production and reproduction, original
and copy, quality and quantity, for instance—lost their relevance in
the framework of Soviet culture. The primary interest of Socialist Realism
was not an artwork but a viewer. Soviet art was produced in the relatively
firm conviction that people would come to like it when they had become
better people, less decadent and less corrupted by bourgeois values. The
viewer was conceived of as an integral part of a Socialist Realist work of art
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