Socialist Realism Summary

To spend years cultivating a theory on the artistic significance of a “[mere] bugaboo used by the censorship to persecute and destroy ‘genuine art’ and its creators,” is a risky endeavour begging for criticism, but Boris Groys makes landmark progress at linking up the threads between the modern and postmodern from a Soviet perspective in The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Sharply critiquing the Clement Greenbergs of the world who dismiss Socialist Realism as politically utilized kitsch as well as the Vladimir Papernyis who treat it as a disconnected Russian “‘lapse… into a ‘primitive state,’” he asserts a two-pronged argument. Not only was Socialist Realistic tradition a cornerstone for the Russian …show more content…
He further explains that its presence in Russian society and subsequent collapse resulted in significant differences between Western postmodernism and Soviet nonconformist art, which he dubs “Russian postutopianism.” The parallels in ideas, process, and goals overcome our initial skepticism based on the radical divide in the appearance and form of the two traditions. Groys pre-empts every difference we can suggest, all of which seem justified by a logical challenge facing the avant-garde which Stalinism was able to satisfy. The largest issue with the work ultimately ends up being the way in which we are convinced of some of these links and justifications. To be certain, there is a limit to the level of empiricism which we can expect when discussing ideas as broadly as Groys does, but examples of ideas enacted within artistic tradition or evidence of some of the actions alluded to would do a great deal to assuage our questions, yet these are largely absent until we reach postutopianism. Along the way, we do get quotations from a variety of the thinkers and artists referenced, but certain points, such as the suggested post-revolution grab for power by avant-garde artists or the assertion that Deleuze and Guattari’s “machine of desire” is the …show more content…
Groys reaches his most engaging when he asserts that the anti-utopian nature of postmodernism succumbs to the goals of Socialist Realism in a way which postutopianism does not because it implicitly provides it with a place of superhistorical significance when it insists that Socialist Realism is a lapse in the historical thread rather than an only somewhat consequential part of it. Groys makes a daring statement when he asserts that postmodern rejection of the authentic and original is just another instance of the same ideological assertion of higher truth and another futile attempt to reorder