Word: socialistic
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García Márquez has been a vocal irritant to rightist regimes from South Africa to Salvador, counts Socialist French President François Mitterrand as a personal friend, and once donated the $22,000 proceeds of a 1972 literary prize to a small left-wing group in Venezuela. But the author refuses to be categorized. "I have never belonged to a Communist Party," he says, "and my only weapon is my typewriter." That weapon has proved to be a formidable capitalist tool. Solitude alone has 10 million copies in print in 32 languages, and has opened publishers...
...These two are taking advantage of the second consonant in Math Ar. Both have at best skimmed the reading so far. Tip is spending very little time campaigning in the district, because, as one aide puts it bluntly. "He doesn't need to," LoPresti has indicated his concern about Socialist opponent William Shakalis by going on a junket to the Orient. The combined possibility of these guys losing Group I status may push 20 percent...
...Leader and Supreme Baby Kisser of the Soviet Peoples has come back to greet us. Who would ever have supposed that the most immediately memorable show in New York City's SoHo, at the start of the 1982 art season, would be a gallery full of mock Stalinist socialist realism, done in the correct borsch-and-gravy colors of official Soviet art 30 years ago? But there is nothing that pluralism will not give us; and so it is with the exhibition by Vitaly Komar (a name that, in Russian, means "mosquito") and Alexander Melamid, which grandly fills...
Perhaps other Russian painters, unknown to the West, are busy boring and clicking like so many deathwatch beetles within the facade of idealist kitsch known as Soviet socialist realism. But it is hard to see how they could ruin it more thoroughly. K & M's paintings are not merely banal, but excruciatingly so, oily and inert, varnished so heavily that three-quarters of the surface is glare; the eye gropes for the cliches that lie embedded in them. The accretion becomes a kind of conceptual art, holding everything in quotation marks...
...Rubens or a Titian, a Velasquez or a Bernini, to fawn on him for a suitable fee. It is the nature of carnivores to get power, at which point, having disposed of their enemies, they deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make them look like herbivores. Stalinist socialist realism was merely the end of this process, carried out by hacks. After it, the more intelligent of the Beloved Leaders would want radio and TV, not painting, to be their cosmeticians. We must thank Melamid and Komar for reminding us what towering heights of awfulness the great lost tradition...