Degenerate Practice: Inconsistencies in Repressive Regimes' Cultural Policies Against Avant-Garde Art
Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Previously understood to have been totally controlling and oppressive, new research has shed light on the fact that, in regards to the enforcement of their cultural policies, some repressive political regimes were not the tyrants that many had believed them to be.In regimes such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini's fascist Italian state, censorship and control of creative expression and art was not enforced to the fullest extent of the governments' capabilities.In this study that questions why avant-garde artists were not oppressed equally within their repressive political societies when their governments had established clearly defined cultural policies that forbade abstraction in art, a proposed answer, which suggests that avantgarde artists with personal connections to the regime were repressed less than those without them, is supported.The results of this study are notable in that they suggest ensuring prolonged and stable political power through a broad base of support is more significant to repressive political regimes than the strict adherence to a particular ideology or set of laws.
Author: Laura D’Andrea Tyson
Language: English
Topic: Art, Politics, and Modernism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W176700925