Just came across this rather spectacular (and scary) view of competing totalitarian monuments from the Paris Expo of 1937.
http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/art-history/werckmeister/March_30_1999 /ParisExpo2.jpg ..Part of the best collection of that genre that I've ever found on the internet: http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/art-history/werckmeister/index.html ....all courtesy of one of William's colleagues -- Otto Karl Werckmeister -- who has also written a few books for Saul and his comrades to help them "reconnect cultural critique to a cultural policy of the Left" Actually -- I was drawn to the site by a sculptor who is mostly known by collectors of Art Deco, Georges Gori -- whose toy-like equestrian is in the foreground -- facing the Seine, across from the monuments of the USSR and the National Socialists. Of special interest to William, might be this representation of Mussolini by Enzo Benedetto. Would William find it any less reprehensible than those fascist-hero portraits that don't need a title to be recognized as such? http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/art-history/werckmeister/May_13_1999/1 231.jpg ...and of special interest to Saul, might be Werckmeister's books -- with quotes like this: "Now, cultural critique could be advanced in even more radical terms, since it no longer felt obliged to offer political solutions and could be expressed in an openly inconclusive hyperbole. Tending toward the aesthetic, the moralistic, and the agnostic, it became a part of the prevailing, officially sanctioned culture that claimed to be critical in and of itself. I have called it Citadel Culture, a performance culture in which moralistic self-incrimination and aesthetic posturing made for a display of glaring tragedy. At this point the Marxist tradition of cultural critique lost any residual political perspective it may have harbored during the preceding decade -- Marxism blended into a cultural critique of politically inconsequential dissent, where it was kaleidescopically configured with poststructuralism, femnism, psychoanalysic, and deconstruction. -- it was reduced to sharing in the coexistance of discrepant values beyond political dispute, the pluralistic social ideal of "postmodern" culture" (which seems similar to the point I was making last year -- that Marxists in the arts are either goofing off - or satisfying an upscale, trendy niche market) ____________________________________________________________ Click for VA loan resources and rate quotes. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/Ioyw6ijmOilJT2TE9p4MLUzvvaREHK gylwa3pFiFwEq4eK1B2E0amo/
