Simply

1. Does "simply" in the provided context mean "only"?

2. Does "where art was to be of functional or political value to the masses" mean "the climate of revolutionary optimism in which art was thought to have a functional and political value for all groups of people"?

Context:

As will be seen, practices developed by the Russian avant-garde in the early part of the century are especially relevant to those that developed in the billboard and poster art of the late 1970s and 1980s, simply because they provided a precedent for the way that the strategies of commercial advertising can be harnessed to avant-garde practice. These developments in Russia were set against a climate of revolutionary optimism, where art was to be of functional or political value to the masses. Late twentieth-century poster and billboard art in the West, however, was to kick against the reactionary politics of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, udring which fine art had become a fashionable and expensive commodity.