Leninist propaganda conveyed through artistic monuments (referred to in this article as `monumental' propaganda) — painting, sculpture, urban architecture — was intended as a way of communicating key political ideas to a largely illiterate population. The politically motivated character of the visual icon made it a helpful tool of communication and instruction, and gradually the visual icon became confused with reality itself. In the 1920s, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) pioneered the use of artistic images as a documental attestation of reality. Under Stalin, monumental visual signs offered an idealized vision of the Communist future as an already achieved reality. Sculptures and paintings secured the state leader's symbolic presence in every corner of the country. Therefore, the subsequent change of political leadership resulted in damnatio memoriae — the destruction of visual images of statesmen from the previous regime. Leninist monumental propaganda perpetuated the neoplatonic artistic tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church, which meant there was no clear distinction between the iconic sign and its referent.

Neuroscience has established several brain pathways that process visual information. Distinct neural circuits analyze body appearance and movement providing information about the person’s cognitive and emotional states. The activity of the pathways depends on the salience of visual stimuli for the organism in the given circumstances. Since ballet performances are not among the crucial events for the viewer’s organism, not all viewers perceive and interpret bodily signs that express the mental state of the dancer. Treatment of the dancer as close other activates the neural circuits that elaborate emotions, this enables the viewer to feel the internal state of the dancer and enrich the interpretation of the scenic action.

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The archived documents on outdoor sculpture commissions in Soviet Latvia reveal that the thesis of art having been colonized by the Communist party is too simplistic. Sculptors and architects had vested business interests in monument production. Until the mid-1950s, the cream of academically-educated Latvian sculptors was sidelined by Russians who mass-produced concrete replicas of statues portraying Lenin or Stalin. The majority of the works came through the mass production of works of visual propaganda in the Māksla art factory. Also, less-talented local sculptors were able to find a role satisfying the demand for cheap, decorative sculpture. Looking for ways to access this market, the local art elite invented aesthetic and semiotic arguments in support of the original, locallymade, Lenin sculptures that would be cast in permanent materials and could serve as the spatial organizers of new communist rituals in the urban environment for which they won municipal commissions resulting in the reconstruction of central squares in Latvian towns. What this means is that artists driven by their mercantile interests and not by ideology played an active part in elaborating the aesthetics of communist ideology, and therefore provided support for the dominant discourse of power relations.