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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Are you serious holding up that propaganda poster as an example of great, or even good, art?

It's far better than Guernica, which isn't saying much. Art should be intelligible, better yet readily intelligible. Guernica is not clear or intelligible, you see a bunch of warped, distorted figures and animals bashing eachother or scrabbling around. The interpretation is absolutely not 'perfectly clear'. If you showed it to someone who'd never seen or heard of Guernica, they couldn't tell you it meant 'war is bad'. Maybe it means that chaos is bad, that there needs to be strong leadership and rigid discipline in society. We only know what it means from context and the title.

If you show someone your art and their first instinct is 'what is this mess' then you've failed. Anyone could immediately tell you the meaning of the Nork propaganda or the other image I mentioned. Even more staggering is that the Nork actually bothered to use some artistic skills beyond throwing shapes on the page. Composition. Colour. Shadow. Vaguely realistic faces!

You're the one who's been saying that negative emotions need grotesque and deliberately broken imagery to be fully expressed, which isn't the case. A corpse can be aesthetically pleasing, if there's good composition and care shown in how its placed. Consider Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau.

You're the one who's been saying that negative emotions need grotesque and deliberately broken imagery to be fully expressed,

No, I didn’t. Not once. I literally said the exact opposite in the post you are responding to. I said that the depiction of suffering cannot be uplifting and aesthetically pleasing. You are the one making claims about what types of images must be included.

A corpse can be aesthetically pleasing, if there's good composition and care shown in how its placed. Consider Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau.

The theme of Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau is not human suffering. It is a celebration of Napoleon.

Art should be intelligible, better yet readily intelligible.

  1. Again, intelligibility was not your original claim.
  2. That being said, I don’t know why ready intelligibility (aka obviousness) is required. What is wrong with asking the viewer to think for 10 seconds.

you see a bunch of warped, distorted figures and animals bashing eachother or scrabbling around

You need to look more closely. It literally includes a depiction of a mother holding a dead child, which you said was the "correct" way to depict suffering.

Even more staggering is that the Nork actually bothered to use some artistic skills beyond throwing shapes on the page. Composition. Colour. Shadow. Vaguely realistic faces!

Are you SURE that Guernica does not employ composition? And colour? That is a requirement of good art? Have you never seen a film noir film? Has it occurred to you that Picasso used greys and blacks to reinforce the tone of the subject? See, eg, Schindler's List.