From the Archive: Moira Roth’s Cold War Aesthetics

In her 1977 feature essay “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” art historian Moira Roth looks back on the “bigoted conviction” and “embittered passivity” that marked literature, film, and visual art during the censorial McCarthy period of the mid-1950s. To develop her conception of “indifference”—a paralytic disaffection of “liberal and self-critical” minds in the face of reactionary […]

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