I wouldn't argue with what you say, but would add, that the
non-existance of markets or artificial markets also stunt thousands
of artists in the West, making artists non-dignified by the various
random sponsoring bodies and self-serving benefectors.
I would say the same about the state of science and education.
So, don't be smug, go for something much better!
Eva
>
> I did not mean to put down the technical abilities or culture of Russians.
> What they have achieved and are capable of is enormous. Nevertheless, I
> would continue to argue that creativity and experimentation were squeezed
> out of the arts during the seventy-year period of communist rule. Vitaly
> Shentalinsky wrote as follows when, in the 1980s, he began search for "lost"
> Russian writers: "About two thousand writers were arrested in the years
> after 1917 and roughly one and a half thousand of them did not survive,
> meeting their deaths in the camps and prisons. These figures are not
> complete, of course. For the time being, it is impossible to verify them. As
> Akhamatova said: 'I would like to recall them all, name by name, but the
> list has been taken, there's nowhere to find out.' The circumstances and
> dates of their deaths have either been concealed or falsified; there are
> large gaps in their official biographies; and the information cited in
> encyclopedias and textbooks is incorrect." (Arrested Voices) Painters
> either had to get out or toe the line and produce the monstrosities we know
> as "Stalinist art". I am not arguing about technical skill. Stalinist
> painters were undoubtedly as skilled as many of the painters of the west -
> perhaps even more so. However, I would argue that they were not allowed to
> be as creative. Seven decades of squeezed creativity would, I believe, have
> a stunting effect on a society.
>
> Best regards,
> Ed Weick
>
>
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