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The hardcore theoretical school of socialist realism as a political theory yes. I thought some of that was lame. The actual practice of some art in the social realist school, no.
I used to have these discussions with in a friend's family with their parents included. The old man had been in Spanish Civil War. He broke both legs in a truck accident and got sent home. The old man took a more relaxed view. Mom took a more hard line side. The eldest brother more to his mother's side. My friend his younger brother and I tended to think they were all a little too doctrinaire. These were great conversations during long dinners (1959-64)
I've got to get Literature and Revolution and read it. I never have. Anyway I used to have these arguments that tended to stress the idea that art production should not get too far above the consciousness of the people, since it was for them and not some elite class. I agreed, but my opponent's ideas of what that level was, in my youthful mind was not very high. This was back in the era when abstract expressionism was still debated.
I finally got a resolution to this problem from reading Arnold Hauser.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hauser.htm
His writing in art history and in the sociology of art showed me the way to resolve this struggle. Film was the one art we all agreed was the most public art of our time, and that it had the real possibility of raising consciousness, and we agreed on what some of the best films were (often done by somebody that was blacklisted). The trouble with making movies of course is it costs a lot of money. And the production system is at the heart of the establishment's order of things.
Video, editing on a computer and reproduction on CDs and or putting the video up on a server has some real radical potential, especially for news, documentary, etc. These cultural systems can completely under cut the monotone blather of the centrally controlled media. The rightwing know this to, so there is a constant drone of populist counter force.
It was just stunning to watch and read the Palestinians in Gaza, compared to the nonsense coming out of Washington and Jerusalem. The same was true of Tehran, then later in Honduras. Here the issue of control gets shifted into the technological structures of the internet and the search engines and how they deliver or conceal.
In terms of black artists and the early US 20thC I was looking into that whole subject during the Michaels dust up. There is a dimension of identity or subjectivity that I think a lot of people don't quite understand. For example we talk about the social construction of the subject, but fail to explain how that is done. A large part of that is done through the arts. The arts very often engage people through their consciousness of themselves and their own subjective understanding of their larger place in the socio-cultural and economic strata. They are the viewer, the listener, and to a lesser extent, the practitioner. The closer the audience and practitioner the better arts we have.
Thanks for posting on Josephson's club and the brothers. I didn't know about them. Some of the musicians and bands were on those old records I had listened to as a kid.
What do I think about Picasso? That's a whole book. He was my introduction to painting. He was one of the painters we agreed on, mostly because of Guernica. The trouble was that in art class you couldn't do that kind of work because it was considered dated. I asked one prof for a critique of some painting I had just finished and he told me, you paint like an old man. In the academy there was a huge pressure to get rid of anything message-like.
CG