Kanan Makiya, reviewing Igor Golomstock’s Totalitarian Art, reflects on the aesthetic sterility of absolutist movements: [Totalitarian art] is often indistinguishable from propaganda. Consider the amateurish poster of Saddam on a white horse (à la Vasily Yaklovev’s portrait of the Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov) that was plastered all over Baghdad in 1989 — the year he rode under his Victory [...]
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