"MIM had three irritating questions in mind... 2) why artists seem to hang about MIM and even put its work in elite places without taking up Maoism".
Mousnonya answers:
1) Artists tend by nature to be individualists expressing their individual experiences -- BUT in the world of practice. Their work ain't contemplative or idealist it is praxis praxis praxis.
Since art is by nature practice, an inter-action with the world it is attracted to Marxism and attractive to Marxists.
At the same time since artistic practice flows from subjective experiences artists are fundamentally individualists and thus tend to liberalism. No artist likes the idea of being silenced. Not only does Your Minister not want to silence her artistic enemies (fascists and capitalists) she actively studies their works. She also doesn't want them to get funded.
Most all artists oppose censorship. This is so we get a multi-sided perspective.
Mao recognized the necessity of multi-faceted thinking and the need to open all art styles and so launched the 100 flowers campaign. I don't care if you paint in blood, shit, watercolor oil or tempera. I do care if you are saying enslaving and murdering others humyns is good or bad.
2) Maoism is about the objective scientific analysis of society. Art is about the expression of subjective emotion. These two things can be linked and Your Minister desperately tries to make that link constantly. There is plenty of beautiful sexy art your minister is not making -- art that would make people laugh and smile, art that Your Minister wants desperately to make. However that art would just about never help the Proletariat and/or (mostly and) impossible to link to Maoism. Lou Reed/Velvet underground successfully express sensuality, the experience of the material world with it's boot, rubber, leather, nails, spikes, whores, cops etc. all these tactile experiences but only rarely can Your Minister harness that work -- just for one example. Similarly with Peter Gabriel. However emotions of anger, rage, outrage can just about always be traced back to imperialism and/or capitalism and used. This is why the anarcho-social-democrat-sometimes-maybe-sort-of-trotskyist-crypto-militarist-LUMPEN clash is so easy to harness. Lumpen roots, and emotions of anger and outrage.
3) Maoism expresses the most extreme of human experiences: oppression, rebellion, victory, defeat, life, death -- lots of raw material for artwork.
4) Decadance -- artists tend to be decadant, like sex, like food, like sleeping late and in this sense artists and lumpen mesh and get on just fine thanks. True a few artists are hermetic they are the exception. If you like pretty pictures obsessively and are waaaaaay into sculpture and an audiophile the sex and food ain't far behind. Artists would probably all get fat except 1) art doesn't pay 2) fat artists are less likely to get laid. So you present a monogamy centred party like MIM to any artist and their first thoughts are going to be "How naive, how unrealistic, and it would be hypocritical for me to pretend to believe in that let alone present myself as such." Well libidinous artists you can park your glands in MSG.
5) Elite places -- Your Minister avoids the entire bourgeois art circuit / exhibition "scene" for security reasons. She's missed out on a lot of tasty whine and cheeze as a result. However the circuit scene is where "the street meets the elite" and of course the elite are wanting their order affirmed and supported. When a nameless four-letter organization whined like pansies about Andy Warhol being supposedly anti Mao that was their reason that Warhol was on the circuit and that was true; you want into the circuit you have to present something new and happening conflictual and thus Maoism (or any other flipping channel that's not been looked at in the last fifteen minutes) works. Being said, in defence of Warhol "I don't care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right". He was simply saying "Mao is as big as Monroe" (at least). He may have been saying "Capitalism and socialism both deliver mass goods" -- which they do. He was not saying "Mao is secretly revisionist!" Do we see pictures of Mao pimping out Jiang by Warhol? No.
