Put the words art controversy into Google News at the moment, and you’ll be directed to a couple of articles about an exhibit in Vienna of North Korean paintings.
The canvases are all Socialist Realist propaganda: Kim Il-sung accepts the hysterically grateful embrace of a soldier; happy round-cheeked girls take up their brooms. The pictures burst forth from the walls, big and bright; and their titles tell you exactly what’s up: The Dear Leader Reassures the Nation of His Commitment to its Security and Well-Being.
There’s a pretty impressive market for North Korean Socialist Realist canvases in the west, I suppose because there aren’t many of them (NK releases some of this work to Chinese dealers, but it’s still a closed country, and not much gets out), and because virtually no other countries produce this sort of thing anymore. Sophisticated Europeans and Americans seem to have a taste for what some people call Communist Kitsch; and while one can certainly find postmodern ironists in Europe and America who experiment with the conventions of agitprop, the North Korean product is authentic, part of a living totalitarian world.
The Vienna controversy arises from the exhibit’s total lack of commentary. You go there and see the pictures. There’s no introductory statement from the museum about how these paintings are cult-of-personality propaganda, how they were painted by servants of the state who, should someone buy them, will receive no compensation, since all proceeds go to the state… Nothing at all, apparently, frames this collection of comically stultifying products of arguably the world’s most repressive state.
The exhibition does not include any background explanation on the totalitarian nature of the North Korean regime, a compromise by the museum with authorities in Pyongyang that came under fire from some politicians and artists. But the MAK forcefully denied it was giving a free pass to the regime’s propaganda.
“Visitors know very well that North Korea is the last dictatorship in the world. There is really no need to remind them of this fact. We just want to show North Korean contemporary art, not to talk about politics,” [the exhibit director] told France24.com
The director of the museum says the same thing:
I am neither a politician nor a political scientist. And besides, everybody knows what sort of a regime that is; we don’t have to explain this to anyone,” [he] said, sipping coffee in his office on the same floor as the North Korean artworks.
The exhibit, then, represents a collision of two aesthetic extremes: The most explicit message-bearing art imaginable meets art for art’s sake. The most dire expression of the reduction of human life to ideology meets the nonchalant gesture of the Vienna curator and director: We need say nothing by way of accompaniment to these images. They are art, and that is all.
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And yet they are arguably not art, since they are the entirely conventional work of anonymous hacks done at the behest of a propaganda machine. Further, since they present themselves as political objects with a message, a message intended to inspire the North Koreans and – I guess – convert outsiders, it’s a little strange for the museum directors to take them apolitically, a little unfair to their intention…
After all, the exhibitors’ aestheticist gesture is itself a political expediency, arising as it does from the museum’s compromise with the regime, its willingness to be silent about its nature in exchange for permission to mount the show.
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A Los Angeles Times writer asks:
[Is the show] merely a stage for a regime that uses art not only as a messenger of its political ideology but also as a source of international funding?
It’s not that, as the reporter worries, the museum is a kind of a dupe of the North Koreans, allowing itself to be used as a platform for their social philosophy. No one thinks North Korea is anything other than a nightmare, and bringing its nightmare images of itself to Austria only deepens the darkness. But there is the intriguing matter of the striking popularity of North Korean propaganda images among hip Europeans and Americans.
[The] work has apparently become a profitable export that is able to skirt North Korea’s international isolation, helping to bring cash back home.
Ardent collectors can travel to the country to shop for art, said Rudiger Frank, professor of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna. Or works can be acquired at specialized galleries in more easily accessible locations, such as Beijing. Art can even be ordered directly from North Korean artists or the associations they work for.
The North Koreans themselves “did not understand at first why we would want such an exhibition.” You bet. Why should their trash generate ardency and high prices among people you’d expect to want Rothko or Freud on their walls?
UD asks her readers.
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Update: “What some in the west would call propaganda.” The BBC points out that really it’s a matter of opinion. Some might say what the North Koreans are drawing is propaganda. Others, great art.
June 29th, 2010 at 2:39PM
North Korean art is a nice example of what Milan Kundera called “totalitarian kitsch” in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “”whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch . . . everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously) . . . .
The question is why hipsters like it. My theory: the usual appeal of kitsch–feeling superior because it’s all just so unsophisticated and tacky–combined with denial or ignorance of the nature of the regime that produced the art. No one, I cross my fingers and hope, would put on a similar display of contextless Nazi kitsch. But communism, I think, gets a pass that Nazism doesn’t, even in cases like this with a regime as ugly and murderous as Kim Jong-Il’s.
June 29th, 2010 at 2:50PM
Interesting, Dave. Mr UD said the same thing — the thing about communism vs. Nazism.
June 29th, 2010 at 3:28PM
Obviously a brilliant and perceptive man.
June 29th, 2010 at 4:27PM
I agree that there’s no need for the gallery to supply a narrative for the North Korean ‘art’. On the other hand, I don’t agree that the vogue for this stuff is about kitsch and hipster irony. I’m pretty sure that it’s about power, and not in a good way– there’s that pile of corpses nearby.
June 29th, 2010 at 7:08PM
I’d like to know more about the collectors. They’re more interesting than the art.
Authenticity? These collectors are probably post-modern critical theory types. This crap is the real deal. Yeah, it’s propaganda, but generated in a genuine dictatorship. Snap it up while you can.
How about radical chic….from a distance.
Weirdness. The DPRK is fuckin weird. Maybe that’s an attraction?
Christopher Hitchens had some adventures there a while back.
http://www.slate.com/id/2243112
A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Kim Jong-il’s regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought.
June 29th, 2010 at 7:41PM
The English articles don’t seem to grasp the nature of the “museum” in question. This is definitely not the Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum, nor the alternative Secession.
The MAK (“Museum of Applied Art[s]”) has a subtly tongue-in-cheek approach to art, and applications thereof, that the English-language press and the North Koreans seem unaware of. It is associated with people whose idea of art, for example, is to wear these jackets around a pedestrian-zone building site where absolutely nothing happens.
June 29th, 2010 at 8:03PM
Hmmmmm.
I am getting a whiff of the not so elusive Homo Hipsterus Vulgaris.
Call the Daleks.
June 29th, 2010 at 8:08PM
About why there is a collector’s market: UK death tax avoidance, same reason as any dubious but expensive art. The UK has a heavily-lobbied art exemption to inheritance tax, under the excuse that no art would be brought to the UK for exhibit if an actuarial risk of death tax applied.
If you want to leave £1M to your kid in cash, the government will tax the heck out of it. Instead, you buy a dead sheep or DPRK art or similar nonsense from a respectable, old-money dealer for £1M and leave that to your kid. Then much later the kid can sell the art back to the dealer, or sell it on to another old-money family who wants to do the same thing, for much closer to £1M than what would be left after taxes.
You can trust the dealer to buy it back because he’s so trustworthy, almost like the Madoffs.
August 13th, 2010 at 7:31AM
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