(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Ukraine Invasion Day 433: some replies included sinking the Black Sea Fleet flagship [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-05-01 Irredental Decay in the Russo-Ukraine War is about the revanchism of Russia recovering its Soviet territories as if demographic relocation created historical sovereignty. Banksy has shown that one doesn’t have to resort to Tchaikovsky and Cossack humor as kitsch much like Clement Greenberg insisted that socialist realism as hyperrealism was kitsch. Putin makes an easy target for what remains media, however valued. The station is even launching musical “expeditions” where they travel to a specific region to gather information from locals about traditional folk music that can then be used to assert Ukrainian cultural independence. “If you learn the music, the folklore, you will see the difference between us and Russia. In that way, it is a real weapon.” “For now, music is a weapon,” argues Makarenko. He mentions the eastern provinces of the country, which have traditionally been heavily influenced by Russian culture and language. “It’s super important for different territories of Ukraine – Donbas, Luhansk, Kharkiv – because until now a lot of people didn’t understand that they are living in Ukraine. So now we are trying to find songs from these regions to show that they are historically Ukrainian territories.” Hidden away in a building near the Dnipro River, you hear Gasoline Radio before you see it. A thumping drum beat thrums through its walls and fills the shabby courtyard out front. Launched by Oleksii Makarenko just two days before the invasion, the station has a clear mission. “We want to make a new image of Ukrainian culture, but it should be based on our history and our heritage,” he says. The station platforms an eclectic mix of genres ranging from traditional Ukrainian folk and classical to electronic, ambient, avant-garde and experimental music. It is hard to imagine living in such circumstances but for many, solace has been found in music . Despite the war – in fact, because of it – Ukraine’s cultural scene is fizzing with artists who have turned to music for comfort and resolve in the darkest of moments. They are using music to steel their souls, assert their identity and inspire opposition to the invasion. At a time of unimaginable fear and suffering, the musicians of Ukraine have decided that playing and listening to music is an act of resistance. Six of them – from orchestras to punk bands and radio broadcasters – tell their stories. While working on the original version, Repin in 1889 began work on a second version. This work remained unfinished. The artist tried to make the second version of The Cossacks more "historically authentic". In 1932 it was transferred by the Tretyakov Gallery to the M. F. Sumtsov Kharkiv Historical Museum. In 1935, it was moved to the Kharkiv Art Museum, where it is now stored. This canvas is slightly smaller than the original version. en.wikipedia.org/... Clement Greenberg first achieved prominence with the publication of an essay titled “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in the fall 1939 issue of Partisan Review. In this essay Greenberg, an avowed Trotskyite Marxist, claimed that avant-garde Modernism was “the only living culture that we now have” and that it was threatened primarily by the emergence of sentimentalized “kitsch” productions—“the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.” For Greenberg, kitsch was endemic to the industrial societies of both capitalism and socialism, and in his view it was the duty of art and literature to offer a higher path. (1939) In his last article on the Soviet cinema in the Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald points out that kitsch has in the last ten years become the dominant culture in Soviet Russia. For this he blames the political regime -- not only for the fact that kitsch is the official culture, but also that it is actually the dominant, most popular culture, and he quotes the following from Kurt London's The Seven Soviet Arts: ". . . the attitude of the masses both to the old and new art styles probably remains essentially dependent on the nature of the education afforded them by their respective states." Macdonald goes on to say: "Why after all should ignorant peasants prefer Repin (a leading exponent of Russian academic kitsch in painting) to Picasso, whose abstract technique is at least as relevant to their own primitive folk art as is the former's realistic style? No, if the masses crowd into the Tretyakov (Moscow's museum of contemporary Russian art: kitsch), it is largely because they have been conditioned to shun 'formalism' and to admire 'socialist realism.'" In the first place it is not a question of a choice between merely the old and merely the new, as London seems to think -- but of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new. The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch. In the second place, neither in backward Russia nor in the advanced West do the masses prefer kitsch simply because their governments condition them toward it. Where state educational systems take the trouble to mention art, we are told to respect the old masters, not kitsch; and yet we go and hang Maxfield Parrish or his equivalent on our walls, instead of Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Moreover, as Macdonald himself points out, around 1925 when the Soviet regime was encouraging avant-garde cinema, the Russian masses continued to prefer Hollywood movies. No, "conditioning" does not explain the potency of kitsch. All values are human values, relative values, in art as well as elsewhere. Yet there does seem to have been more or less of a general agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the ages as to what is good art and what bad. Taste has varied, but not beyond certain limits; contemporary connoisseurs agree with the eighteenth-century Japanese that Hokusai was one of the greatest artists of his time; we even agree with the ancient Egyptians that Third and Fourth Dynasty art was the most worthy of being selected as their paragon by those who came after. We may have come to prefer Giotto to Raphael, but we still do not deny that Raphael was one of the best painters of his time. There has been an agreement then, and this agreement rests, I believe, on a fairly constant distinction made between those values only to be found in art and the values which can be found elsewhere. Kitsch, by virtue of a rationalized technique that draws on science and industry, has erased this distinction in practice. www.sharecom.ca/... (2013) For Greenberg there were only two polarities of culture: serious high modernist art, such as Eliot's poetry or a cubist painting, versus the vacuous art preferred by the majority , including pop music and the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Nowadays almost everything Greenberg considered kitsch has been reclaimed; the idea that pop music is junk today is quite rightly inconceivable. So where does that leave kitsch? It brands a kind of art that seems to care nothing for taste – and this has become a crucial prop to modern culture at a time when "serious" art may have little to it beyond a declaration of superior judgment. Thus, an empty room with a folk song playing in it is not likely to be dismissed as kitsch – it may be fairly banal, but it is not vulgar, ostentatious, garish. Kitsch serves as an opposite against which the non-kitsch defines itself. [...] The painter Cy Twombly once told an interviewer he listened to music when he worked. The interviewer thought he meant modernist music, but no – he listened to Tchaikovsky. I love that lack of "good taste". Tchaikovsky is both kitsch and profound. www.theguardian.com/… x A woman apparently had a 'screaming,' 'loud and full body orgasm' at an LA Philharmonic performance https://t.co/WezBzf9ekn — UPROXX (@UPROXX) May 1, 2023 Witness Tchaikovsky, a "kitsch of genius," according to Hermann Broch, or the Finnish composer, Sibelius, whose encounter with similar accusations seems to have birthed the fumbling with disharmony in his last symphonies. worldwidekitsch.com/... Woman had a "loud and full body orgasm" during LA Philharmonic concert to the point where the whole orchestra stopped playing for a moment. 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