This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

I have this idea.

Art is a lot like Isaac Newton's third law of motion.

Just hear me out for a second.

As the law states for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The forces of motion push and pull at each other,

and in the same way, artistic movements exist in tension with themselves. You cannot have modernism without postmodernism as an essential counterbalancing force. And in that regard,

consider the historical significance of art in relation to totalitarianism.

Every time a state uses art as a means of control, oppression, or propaganda,

they cannot fully contain how that will reverberate in the greater artistic world.

Oppressive art can birth art that is, in its very form, an expression of rebellion.

In 1934, Maxim Gorky proposed an artistic philosophy that would become known as

socialist realism, as an artistic expression of the New Soviet Union.

The works in this field would celebrate the state and the party for the people.

It was supposed to be a movement, but it would become a doctrine.

The form of the work became the way in which the art was supposed to be a movement, but it would become a doctrine. The form of the

work became the way in which the art was supposed to look in Soviet Russia. And naturally,

it provoked a response. The generation that came later birthed these so-called 60 years,

...