- \n
- Art<\/a><\/li>\n
- Communism<\/a><\/li>\n
- Counterpoints<\/a><\/li>\n
- Eastern Europe<\/a><\/li>\n
- Education<\/a><\/li>\n
- History<\/a><\/li>\n
- Politics<\/a><\/li>\n
- Russia<\/a><\/li>\n
- The West<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
20 November, 2008<\/p>\n
It takes a special kind of genius to make the history of the Cold War dull and uninformative. That genius seems to have been behind the Victoria and Albert Museum\u2019s exhibition Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970<\/em>. To be fair, the exhibition was not quite as bad as I feared when I read in the introductory notes that the competition in the post-war period was between two kinds of society: free-market democracies and those organised \u201cfor the benefit of ordinary people\u201d. I gritted my teeth in expectation of being told that there was no real difference between the two systems and, if anything, communism was slightly preferable because it cared about \u201cordinary people\u201d.<\/p>\n
Then it improved and several unpleasant things were mentioned: suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and of the Prague Spring, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and \u2026 well, nothing much else except for the fact that beautiful designs in the West were available to many people and in the East never went into production. With no background information, no timeline, no real explanation who the various people mentioned in the notes were and what happened to them, this exhibition provides some entertainment to those who knew about the Cold War and nothing much to others.<\/p>\n
A group of bored-looking students stopped by a display of late-1940s drawings and posters: Picasso\u2019s dove, Topolski\u2019s sketches of participants in the Soviet-sponsored Wroc?aw Peace Congress and a very funny French anti-communist poster that showed Stalin as a Paris tough with the peace dove on a leash. They were silent for a couple of minutes, then a boy said: \u201cMust be American.\u201d More silence. One of the girls read the notice and muttered tentatively: \u201cNo, I think it\u2019s French. Yes, it says it\u2019s French.\u201d I was sorely tempted to suggest that the fact that the writing on the poster was in French and the address given was in Paris might have been a clue but was even more intrigued when the first boy replied to the girl: \u201cI thought if it\u2019s Western, it must be American.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is the sort of ignorance we have to deal with and the exhibition did not provide the necessary antidote. In the end, design and illustrations are not really what the Cold War was about, but the V&A is not equipped to deal with politics, ideology or the sheer nastiness of the communist system. <\/p>\n
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<\/h3>\n
\n![\"Default](\"http:\/\/standpoint.thewebsitespace.com\/wp-content\/themes\/tws\/images\/thumbnail-default.jpg\"\/)
Letters: Parents first, Ancient and modern, Seeing red<\/a>
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\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/GettyImages-1229044062-covid-liverpool-120x120.jpg\"\/)
Rebuilding the Red Wall tier by tier<\/a>
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\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/polemis-Armitage_2015_mydressmychoicehigh-res.jpg\"\/)
A breath of fresh paint<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
<\/h3>\n
\nLetters: Parents first, Ancient and modern, Seeing red<\/a>
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\nRebuilding the Red Wall tier by tier<\/a>
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\nA breath of fresh paint<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new museum exhibition of Cold War art leaves the nastiness of the communist system completely unacknowledged<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- Communism<\/a><\/li>\n