Iosif Maseev, “Beyond the Limits of Art,” translated from Russian by Christina Lodder, originally published as “Za predelami iskusstva,” in Iskusstvo, 2 (1968): 55–58 (excerpt)

Iosif Maseev’s essay “Beyond the Limits of Art” represents an orthodox Marxist–Leninist critique of Pop art, as well as Abstraction, Surrealism, and Kinetic art, which reveals a detailed knowledge of the theory and practice of American and European art of the 1950s and 1960s. The creators of Pop art have grasped (opportunely, it must be admitted) this yearning of viewers for a figurative art and they have used it very cleverly. It is one of several artistic trends that have emerged in the USA and are native to it. The cult of “objects” implanted for decades in the psychology of “middle” America has facilitated the rapid success of this uniquely aesthetic “art-preparation,” which has been publicized in the press and on the radio. At every possible opportunity, the adherents of Pop art try to attack the realists’ primitive (in their opinion) custom of identifying the essence of beauty and opposing it to ugliness.