Smart Museum of Art University of Chicago

Vision and Communism

In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky’s art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure⎯or restore⎯Communism’s moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky’s art demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interracial togetherness was still only a vague rumor on Madison Avenue.

This volume presents a series of interconnected essays devoted to Viktor Koretsky’s art and the social worlds that it hoped to transform. Produced collectively by Robert Bird (The University of Chicago), Christopher P. Heuer (Princeton University), Matthew Jesse Jackson (The University of Chicago), Tumelo Mosaka (Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois), and Stephanie Smith (Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago), this writing also considers the visual art, film, and music included in the Smart Museum exhibition Vision and Communism.

$24.95
Paperback, 176 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4"
ISBN: 978-1-59558-625-4
© 2011

Published by The New Press, New York.