The Null Device

Art movement of the day: Neoconservative Realism:

In addition to the prints, Birk has made a number of paintings, including The Liberation of Baghdad, seen here. The paintings are more satirical and ironic, and many are based on paintings of the glories of war in Napoleon's time and from Russian socialist images of battlefield glories.

The Liberation of Baghdad, says Birk, is about "what we were told would happen -- happy, joyfully liberated Iraqis welcoming American troops as we free them from the shackles of oppression."

(via Boing Boing) ¶ art iraq politics satire socialist realism usa 2

Loose Talk Is Noose Talk: A look at the NSA's retro-styled information-security posters. Very retro, and not too unlike Soviet Socialist Realism.

Tangent #1: Does anybody remember the old Microsoft Word for Windows installer, from the days when it came on floppies and ran on Windows 3.1? It had the usual set of images shown whilst installing, but to save space, they were all vector images, of neat arrays of documents, office computers and such. It struck me how they looked like the late-capitalist equivalent of Soviet propaganda posters.

Tangent #2: Does anybody know where I could find images of the propaganda posters from Terry Gilliam's Brazil?

¶ microsoft word nsa posters socialist realism 3