Yeah I'm not really saying that getting art to this point is a bad thing, merely that I struggle to imagine it because I struggle to imagine a societal system that isn't repressing one form of art or another with the goal of reinforcing the ideology of the system and undermining art that threatens the system.
It's a rather silly example but I don't imagine any bourgeoise art will be particularly "free" under socialism, not that I want it to be but you get my general thought process.
I struggle to imagine a societal system that isn’t repressing one form of art or another with the goal of reinforcing the ideology of the system
Some systems are self-reinforcing in a way that doesn't require a direct social hierarchy. Capitalists, particularly Libertarians, love to disparage this kind of organization as "hive-mind" mentality. Liberals like to define it as Ludditism, particularly when it gets in the way of their Brave New World neoliberal fantasies. But people can and do act collectively in their self-interest without asking a guy like Stalin for permission. Arguably, the sharpest distinction between Russian Soviet model and the Chinese Mass Line is the degree to which the Maoists accommodated localized self-determination. Also, incidentally, what makes the Chinese system cleaner at the upper echelons but dirtier down below.
It’s a rather silly example but I don’t imagine any bourgeoise art will be particularly “free” under socialism
I think that a great deal of the appeal of bourgeois liberalism is the distance between the proletariat and the elites. Who wouldn't want to be in Elon Musk's position (prior to buying Twitter)? By contrast, I'm not enormously envious of the guy that runs a mid-sized boat dealership. If that mid-sized boat dealership guy wants to cosplay as Harry Potter or write neo-confederate fan fiction, even less so.
One is inevitably going generate more emulation than the other.
Yeah I'm not really saying that getting art to this point is a bad thing, merely that I struggle to imagine it because I struggle to imagine a societal system that isn't repressing one form of art or another with the goal of reinforcing the ideology of the system and undermining art that threatens the system.
It's a rather silly example but I don't imagine any bourgeoise art will be particularly "free" under socialism, not that I want it to be but you get my general thought process.
Some systems are self-reinforcing in a way that doesn't require a direct social hierarchy. Capitalists, particularly Libertarians, love to disparage this kind of organization as "hive-mind" mentality. Liberals like to define it as Ludditism, particularly when it gets in the way of their Brave New World neoliberal fantasies. But people can and do act collectively in their self-interest without asking a guy like Stalin for permission. Arguably, the sharpest distinction between Russian Soviet model and the Chinese Mass Line is the degree to which the Maoists accommodated localized self-determination. Also, incidentally, what makes the Chinese system cleaner at the upper echelons but dirtier down below.
I think that a great deal of the appeal of bourgeois liberalism is the distance between the proletariat and the elites. Who wouldn't want to be in Elon Musk's position (prior to buying Twitter)? By contrast, I'm not enormously envious of the guy that runs a mid-sized boat dealership. If that mid-sized boat dealership guy wants to cosplay as Harry Potter or write neo-confederate fan fiction, even less so.
One is inevitably going generate more emulation than the other.