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Wendelin St Clair's avatar

I think the solution is quite simple, actually, and it came to me when I was listening to a fascinating podcast episode on art in North Korea. Contrary to popular Western perception (including mine before listening to the podcast) North Korean art isn't all crude propaganda (though I actually quite like their propaganda posters, and on a purely artistic level they're infinitely better than any 'real art' being made in the West, and on an ideological level their propaganda is actually more honest, more coherent and less noxious. And they have the decency to call it what it is)--in fact they don't consider propaganda posters art at all; it's their equivalent of advertising.

Actually North Korea has a deep and thriving artistic culture. Rather than adopting foreign styles (including all modern and postmodernist atrocities of anti-art) they have instead (because they have no choice) turned inwards, deepening and refining their own indigenous artistic traditions. An example is the traditional 'Chosonhwa' ink-and-brush on rice paper painting, which North Korea has innovated by adding colour and boldness (traditional Chinese, Japanese and South Korean inkwash paintings are black and white and extremely subtle).

There are innumerable highly talented artists in North Korea (which houses the largest art studio in the world --Mansudae, basically a self-contained miniature city-cum-college campus for artists) and they work in a wide variety of styles, but all traditional and representative in form and patriotic and traditional in theme.

And they don't resent this, either. They're not being forced to do it. They genuinely want to produce patriotic and traditional art. They don't yearn to indulge in abstract subversive abominations. When North Koreans have been shown modern Western art, they simply laugh at it. Not out of knowing contempt, but sheer innocent amusement. They simply can't understand it, or why anyone would want to paint that way.

And one's selection to treat subjects of national significance -- anything related to the nation, the state, national history and so on--depends directly on your skill. Only the most skilled artists in the country are allowed to paint the Leaders, for instance. Thrift store artists, though I'm sure their equivalents exist in the North Korea, or would if they could afford paint, brushes and canvas, have no access to artistic materials or training or a public platform and are simply not allowed to depict anything with political or ideological significance. And there simply aren't any North Koreans sick enough in the head and soul to want to produce anything like the 'art' that stinks up all our Western art galleries.

Localism and subsidiarity is something I too support in principle, but in practice we are dealing with a a population and a culture so totally depraved (in the proper Calvinist sense of being corrupt in every part, not as corrupt as it conceivably could be), mass and elite, high and low, that a long period of strongly centralised control will be necessary to purge the rank infection that has overtaken us. Our collective moral and aesthetic compasses are so irreparably broken and inverted they will have to be completely smashed before they can be reoriented to point to true north again. Think of it as a period of intense weeding before the garden will be able to bloom naturally once more. It will take a great deal of discipline before we can once more learn how to be free--and can be trusted with the freedom we have earned--trusted not to destroy ourselves again. Just like a driver who's nearly driven himself and his whole family off a cliff will need a great deal of retraining and tests before he can be allowed behind the wheel again.

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Mosby Woods's avatar

Wonderful article. Thank you for sharing it.

I thought of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Keane

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