Robin wrote
>A favourite William S. Burroughs simile: "...as fake as a
>Communist mural.
WSB was right of course with reagrd to the Soviet bloc and I don't think he
referred to the Mexican variety, which is a much superior animal. Rivera
etc.
> No different? Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Kline, Newman et al were
> toured around Europe as GIANT examples of The Kinds of Things You Can
> Do In The States (Without Being Killed; In Fact, Here`s A Grant).
> "Stifling"..? Why wasn`t there much of an avant-garde in Russia "at
> the time, to be honest". Does "stifling" do it justice? Mightn`t
> the State Dept. have a point?
Yes they did, but my point was that the reasons they did what they did were
identical. (Prmotion of the cultural superiorty of ciuntry X.) The fact
that one side had the better product to promote - due to structural
deficiencies (like murder, imprisonment, lack of free speech etc) in the
other - was decisive.
Tony
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