Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Soviet Boxart

 The poor Soviet boxart has a very deep reason for its existence, it is not simply because things became ugly under socialism, but because there was a theory of art behind it, in fact a Political Theory of Art, according to the Marxist principles, Punin said:

"The element of representation is already a characteristic element of a bourgeois understanding of art."

From there to say that Art is Bourgeois and therefore contrary to the People there was only one step, and they took it, Soviet Art cannot be beautiful, because beauty is what prerevolutionary art was looking for, while art for the People seek to spread a political message, and whoever does not do so does not deserve to be done, things like Color, Composition, Form, Current, are bourgeois concepts, (even Cubism and the Most Impressive were despicable Bourgeois Art).

An example, two colours Boxart,

It is true that there were attempts to get out of this rigid scheme, but unlike the West, artists who did not agree, were placated by the KGB, accused of being counterrevolutionaries, the Stalinist Terror kept at bay any type of discrepancy from the orthodox theory Marxist.

And so we have Boxart that we can hardly call Art, the old Frog models, manufactured in the USSR, only had a reduction to two colors or sometimes to one), of the Original Boxart of the British manufacturer, basically an example of Industrial Art, where the Boxart only indicated the content and was made using the least amount of materials possible.

After talking about so much Marxism, I go for a delicious Ham-Bourgeois, so that the Stalinist Marxist artists writhe in their graves.

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