Government Sponsored Art. It’s THAT Good!

Building North Korea-style monuments for cash-strapped countries has become a cash lifeline for Kim Jong Il's regime.

"Juche, all the way!, right?" The philosophy of self-relaiance always seems to need to do business outside of the bubble with those horrible capitalist "creators of wealth"...

Much of the unit’s output is propaganda, he said. But they also produce inoffensive nature scenes or ceramics largely bought by Chinese or Japanese customers. “There is no post-modernism, no concept of the viewer deciding the meaning,” Cockerell said. “It’s a more naive style.”

Incapable of irony as they are, expect the usual sophistication too:

Senegal's colossal statue stirs big controversy

But the centerpiece statue — of a man, woman and baby ascending a mountain — is rendered in the signature Stalinist North Korean style. The couple is reminiscent of Soviet-depicted Bolshevik revolutionaries, only with African heads.

In fact, in the original mock ups, North Korean designers hadn’t bothered to change the statue’s features from Asian to African, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade told the Wall Street Journal. They were altered only after his complaints. The president was later criticized for paying the U.N.-sanctioned foreign regime $27.7 million for the statue while unemployment in his own country neared 50 percent.