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| 20th Century authoritarian kitsch: Roses for Stalin, by Boris Vladimirski |
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| 21st Century authoritarian kitsch: Teach a Man to Fish, by Jon McNaughton |
For a didactic, ideological painting with a clunkingly obvious propaganda message, Teach a Man to Fish sure poses a lot of questions. I'd add one more question to the list. Who's morally worse, Vladimirski or McNaughton?
You could say Vladimirski was worse, on the grounds that his painting was a fawning celebration of a mass murderer. Say what you like about Trump, but he can't come close to matching Stalin's body count, and probably never will (unless he pokes the nuclear button).
On the other hand, Vladimirski and his fellow socialist realists were churning out obsequious hack work in a society where dissent could be punished by a one-way ticket to the Gulag, or a bullet to the back of the head. McNaughton doesn't have the excuse of acting under duress when he churns out his obsequious hack work.
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