Sohrab Ahmari

“What unites the identitarians who lord over the art world is the belief that art is primarily, even solely, a political enterprise. That was also the premise of Socialist Realism, the theory and style of art promoted in the former Soviet Union. One could fairly contend that identitarian art is something like our era’s version of Socialist Realism.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts

“This last is identitarian art’s greatest injustice against the culture: since social power dynamics and collective identity are all that such art knows and cares about, its practitioners can’t grapple with individuality, with things of the soul, with the inner life – the very things that draw most of us to art in the first place.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts