Word: proletariat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most of the benefits going to a handful of stars at the top and scarcely anything to the rest. The American art education system, churning out as many graduate artists every five years as there were people in late 15th century Florence, has in effect created an unemployable art proletariat whose work society cannot "profitably" absorb. Generous tax laws, which enabled collectors to buy low, keep a picture for years and then reap a tax benefit by giving it to a museum at its enhanced value, fueled the art boom. The inequity of such laws has been that...
Caucasian Chalk Circle, currently being produced by the Harvard Law School Drama Society, boldy pits the bourgeois authority--manifested in the persons of the governor of a Caucasian Village and his wife--against the simple stolidity of the proletariat, in the person of Grusha, their servant girl. The backdrop is the bloody imbroglio of civil war. Grusha, simply and sincerely portrayed by Brooke Stark, retrieves the governor's child. Michael, who has been left behind in the frenzied exodus from the Village. She protects the baby throughout the conflict, risking her personal safety as well as her love...
...Soviet Union has its client dictators too. Rather than just tolerating leftist tyrannies, the Kremlin justifies them with dogma and defends them with tanks. Those that call themselves socialist and persecute in the name of the proletariat often seem more enduring than ideologically reactionary, avowedly anti-Communist dictatorships. Most of their staying power is due to the Soviet tanks, ready to roll over incipient democratization as they did in Prague in 1968. Political geography also helps leftist totalitarianism. It has been most durable in Eastern Europe, wedged snugly within the postwar Soviet sphere of influence, though even in that bloc...
Author Pikul's suggestion that the empress slept with Rasputin, for which there is no basis in fact, seems designed merely to appeal to the prurient interests of the proletariat. So do passages alluding to Rasputin's vast sexual appetite and his zest for orgies-which have been amply documented by historians. But the book seemingly has other and more unsavory functions. One is to encourage the xenophobia that still has a strong hold on the many Russian chauvinists in the elite, who believe that alien forces have caused their homeland's troubles down through the ages...
Lenin had already conceived of a mass culture, separate and distinct from the high culture of the salons and the Bolshoi; and in 1917 the Central Committee announced that "in art, the proletariat is drawn to ... strong, bright and clear forms, to what is complete and has definite meaning." This was probably meant to encourage agitprop poster design. The artists, however, took it as a stamp of approval for cubo-futurism, suprematism, constructivism and the other isms that the ferment of Western art had helped set off. In their enthusiasm to create a new culture that would be a synthesis...