On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Call me an aesthete and a formalist, but freshly beautiful use of
> language, and emotional and/or intellectual complexity. What makes so
> much "political" art bad is that it recycles cliches - that it's
> painfully earnest and straightforward.
Of course there are also lots of examples of propaganda being made into great art, from Pick-Up on South Street to Richard III. Both are very earnest and straightforward. And tremendous.
Michael