Comment by Vespasian
14 days ago
I would sort propaganda posters in the same category as commercial advertisements.
Some are good, some are bad but there usually is a certain degree of artistic skill involved (think about "keep calm and carry on" or "I want you")
E.g: scrolling through this list one can see examples for both cases.
https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/propaga...
In my view, such skill with painting is largely mis-labelled as creativity. It's pretty much a technical skill. The design and subject matter of the posters are where the creativity lies. The two things often get conflated, perhaps because of their joint use in the creation of great paintings, but they're fairly separable.
I would put it a bit differently: A lot of great art has simply been applied craftsmanship. The idea that art has to make a statement or the like to be art, per se, is a fairly modern notion, and often helps excuse zero craftsmanship nonsense like a Finnish "artist" dumping a bunch of blood and shit into a washing machine and calling it art.