--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote: Well, yes true. Still, I would not want to exalt one at the expense of the other.
It's a lot more complicated than that. The high-modern can be as formulaic as the lives of the saints and, as Villion shows, simple is not necessarily simple minded. As for the lives of the saints, I saw a couple of Rublev's icons and I was blown away.
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I don't have anything against folk art. It's just doesn't require a whole lot of education or sophistication to get, which is probably part of the point. Actually that was part of the point of SocRealism too... Understandanle to everyone and conveying a central message.
By coincidence I'm proofreading the English catalogue of a British art trader who specializes in Russian art. He once told me, "you know, a lot of that early Socialist Realist art is actually is actually a hell of a lor better than the late avant-garde stuff it was supposed to replace."
Interestingly, some of Mayakovsky's greatest visual achievements were in the area of -- commercial advertising. He did ads for private firms during the NEP.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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