It is not open dissent, but a discreet stance.
[3] A revolt "so well hidden that it seems nonexistent",[4] it is a quest "to extend the boundaries of official tolerance, either by adopting a line considered by authorities to be ideologically suspect, or by highlighting certain contemporary social problems, or both.
"[3] Criticized for being "utopian, and thus inadequate to the realities of that age",[5] during the time of the Communist regimes in Europe, it was also a surviving formula, a modality for writers and artists to cheat Communist censorship without going the whole way into open political opposition.
[6][7] One of the most sharply criticized phrases in post-revolutionary Romania,[8] considered to be not much more than "blowing in the wind" by Romanian-born German Nobel literature prize winner Herta Müller,[9] and "not only resignation [...] but complicity with the terrorist communism" by Romanian exiled writer Paul Goma,[10] so-called "resistance through culture" has often been linked to Constantin Noica's so-called "Păltiniș School".
[11] In the fine arts, Corneliu Baba, among others, is sometimes considered to be an example of a painter who was nonconformist in this way.