Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Conservatives do learn

According to the March 24 New York Times, Governor Paul LePage of Maine has ordered the removal from Maine's Department of Labor building of a mural depicting Maine's workers. According to the article, "A spokeswoman said Mr. LePage, a Republican, ordered the mural removed after several business officials complained about it and after the governor received an anonymous fax saying it was reminiscent of 'communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.'" The link is here, with a picture of the mural.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/us/24lepage.html

And here's your portrait of a thinker whose ideas about aesthetics interestingly anticipated Governor LePage's.



Click to enlarge. The patronymic initial is wrong; it should be A, not O. With that correction, the transliterated name under the portrait is A. A. Zhdanov.

And about Zhdanov, who was the chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet from 1938 to 1947 and the most important Socialist Realist aesthetician, Maynard Solomon writes:

Zhdanov's and Radek's 1934 call for Socialist Realism coincided precisely with cancellation of the liberal abortion and divorce laws, with passage of strict laws against homosexuality and with the arrest of a large number of homosexuals among the intelligentsia, accused of conspiracy with the Roehm Nazis.  (Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary [1973; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979] 239)