See Andrew Klavan’s The Art of Corruption: The National Endowment for the Arts violates its founding principle on the City Journal website.
The president is following the precedent established by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
From the Literary Dictionary: socialist realism:
socialist realism, a slogan adopted by the Soviet cultural authorities in 1934 to summarize the requirements of Stalinist dogma in literature: the established techniques of 19th‐century realism were to be used to represent the struggle for socialism in a positive, optimistic light, while the allegedly ‘decadent’ techniques of modernism were to be avoided as bourgeois deviations.
From the Art Encyclopedia: Socialist Realism:
In the summer of 1934, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, Socialist Realism was proclaimed the approved method for Soviet artists in all media. Andrey Zhdanov, who gave the keynote address at the Congress, was Stalin’s mouthpiece on cultural policy until his death in 1948. In the words of his leader, the artist was to be ‘an engineer of the human soul’. The aim of the new creative method was ‘to depict reality in its revolutionary development’; no further guidelines concerning style or subject-matter were laid down. Accordingly, the idea of what constituted Socialist Realism evolved negatively out of a series of cultural purges orchestrated by Zhdanov in the pages of Pravda, the party newspaper, and enforced at local level by the union branches.
Back to summary...
