ABSTRACT
The ways in which socialist values, stories and ways of thinking have been aestheically packaged have varied during the movement's 150-year history. The socialist movement's significance for modern art, handicrafts, design, music, dance, theater, literature, propaganda, fashion and architecture of different styles and forms can hardly be overestimated. The notion that socialism and realism are like conjoined twins is, however, one-sided and misleading. The concept should point to what various cultural and artistic expressions share aesthetically. It should designate the attitude to reality and to the possibilities of the semiotic and aesthetic expressions that lie behind the choice of the specific style. Idealism as a way of viewing culture and as a politics of culture is thus characterized by the hope that art will be able to unite aesthetic enjoyment with wisdom and with the exhibition of a higher sense of morality.
