>>17869327
If you wanted to have any significant career as an artist, you'd end up working for the state, but the nature of the thing was that only praising the situation or criticizing the system's opponents was permitted. So you get high-quality images like that, but it was stifling for artists because anything new had to be examined and approved or disapproved. That also extended to experiments in form. Artists would want to come up with something new in style, but they had to express the correct ideas, and you'd think that wouldn't be a problem if they fit the correct ideas into the new syle/form, but it could be, and they'd have to wrestle with the system. During Stalin's time all forms of artistic expression (the form) that he personally didn't like were forbidden (and he didn't have great taste).

Capitalist countries have a different problem in that a lot of artists end up selling their soul to the market or what "sells."