Kanan Makiya defines totalitarian art:
The crucial element in the creation of totalitarian culture was the involvement of the state, not indirectly, through the financing of culture, but directly, by imposing a "dictatorship of taste," as the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky enthusiastically called it.
To find, as in post-Baathist Iraq, boxes of files containing hundreds of pages of correspondence from the Office of the President providing guidance on the minutiae of wall posters and paintings and murals and monuments made in Baghdad under Saddam, even as he was waging wars with Iran, Kuwait, and the United States: this is the true measure of totalitarian culture, not what this or that Iraqi artist said about art before Saddam even came to power.
(Photo of Iraq's Victory Arch, modeled on Saddam Hussein's own arms, by Jim Gordon via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 