Untitled

Educating the Masses
and, at the same time, as its final product. Socialist Realism was the attempt
to create dreamers who would dream Socialist dreams.
To promote the creation of a new humankind, and especially of a
new public for their art, artists joined forces with those in political power.
This was undoubtedly a dangerous game for artists to play, but the rewards
appeared at the beginning to be enormous. The artist tried to attain absolute
creative freedom by throwing off all moral, economic, institutional, legal, and
aesthetic constraints that had traditionally limited his or her political and
artistic will. But after the death of Stalin all utopian aspirations and dreams
of absolute artistic power became immediately obsolete. The art of official
Socialist Realism became simply a part of the Soviet bureaucracy—with all
the privileges and restrictions connected to this status. Soviet artistic life after
Stalin became a stage on which the struggle against censorship was played
out. This drama had many heroes who managed to widen the framework of
what was allowed, to make “good artworks,” or “truly realistic artworks,” or
even “modernist artworks” on the borderline of what was officially possible.
These artists and the art critics who supported them became well known and
were applauded by the greater public. Of course, this struggle involved a lot
of personal risk that in many cases led to very unpleasant consequences for
the artists. But still it is safe to say that within the post-Stalinist art of Socialist
Realism a new value system had established itself. The art community valued
not the artworks that defined the core message and the specific aesthetics of
Socialism Realism, but rather the artworks that were able to widen the borders
of censorship, to break new ground, to give to other artists more operative
space. At the end of this process of expansion Socialist Realism lost its borders
almost completely and disintegrated, together with the Soviet state.
In our time the bulk of Socialist Realist image production has been
reevaluated and reorganized. The previous criteria under which these artworks
were produced have become irrelevant: neither the struggle for a new society
nor the struggle against censorship is a criterion any longer. One can only
wait and see what use the contemporary museum system and contemporary
art market will make of the heritage of Socialist Realism—of this huge
number of artworks that were initially created outside of, and even directed
against, the modern, Western art institutions.