Unfortunately, it may be negative when art becomes the mean of propaganda of some totalitarian state which destroys any freedom of artistic creativity and uses art only to promote its ideology. In our history we can find a lot of examples of such 'cooperation` of art and politics. Probably, one of the most notorious is the Nazi regime in Germany in 1930-40s when a lot of really great artists were either repressed or exiled from their motherland and those who remained in Germany had to obey to the regime. As a result, German book industry, the fine arts, music, theatres, film production were controlled by Goebbels who was responsible for political propaganda of the Nazi party. Naturally, practically all works of art glorified the Third Reich and its leader A. Hitler. Certainly, the situation had dramatically changed after the failure of the Nazi regime and new, democratic principles replaced old ones not only in politics but in art as well.
But you shouldn`t think that we could find such examples only in a `dark` past. Let`s take Cuba as an example. Nowadays, everything in this country is controlled by the Castro`s regime and the situation there is not much better than in Nazi Germany. For example, a famous Cuban painter Gilberto Romero Jr. has declared that he wanted to leave Cuba and since 1994 he had lived in the US. As a result, the Cuban government began to remove all his works from museums and art galleries. Moreover, all his exhibits were prohibited. Naturally, in such circumstances art can only have ideological meaning and is completely controlled by the regime which artists had to glorify without even a possibility for free creative work.
Fortunately, we also have some examples of positive interaction of political changes and art. To prove this statement I want to say a few words about South African art evolution, namely its theatre, within political transmission from ideology of apartheid to the abandonment of racial inequality. According to such political changes the local theatre also evaluated from the Theatre of Resistance and the Protest Theatre to the Theatre of Reconciliation. As a wonderful example of the latter I would name the work of Athol Fugard, a famous South African pioneer of both the Protest Theatre and the Theatre of Reconciliation. One of his most famous plays is "Playland" in which he depicts a black man, Martinus Zoeloe, who killed a white man for raping his fiancée. Zoeloe was punished, he suffered and understood that he was wrong, he felt sorry. He is confronted by Gideon le Roux, a white soldier who killed black people and who also suffered. Finally, they both agree to forget the past and to become 'buddies`. It is noteworthy that this work shows the common trend of the art development in new political circumstances in this country.
Thus, it is evident that very often any changes in political situation and political culture define the nature and meaning of art. For art development is impossible in isolation from social and political life, I believe that the situation would hardly be changed.
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