re: #108 wheat-dogg

McNaughton has mastered/imitated the kind of iconography that China used in the time of Mao, and the USSR used in the times of Lenin and Stalin.

See also, the kind of Christian “art” you can find at flea markets and thrift stores.

Authoritarians are terrified of ambiguity of meaning and subtlety. You can’t trust symbolism that isn’t part of a formal set. You can’t trust individual viewers to react how you want, if you don’t control the precise way they receive that art and “get” what it means.

Independent of the specifics of ideology, what ends up developing is a aesthetic that (1) crawls with pre-coded signifiers, (2) has a brutalist approach to commanding a specific reaction from the viewer, (3) is, within the cultural spectrum, trite and sentimental, (4) scared shitless of subjective value of art and thus incorporates a moral component to judgement of quality—decadence, degeneracy used to dismiss individualism and abstraction.

I mean, I’m just making that shit up on the fly, but I’d stand by it in general.