Why Authoritarians hate Modern Art
<p><strong>Why Authoritarians hate Modern Art: a polemic… Here, I explore the reasons behind the disdain of authoritarians towards contemporary art.</strong></p>
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<p>“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others” David Hume, 1757.</p>
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<p>Adolf Hitler and his party convened a gallery four years into his regime to showcase, what according to the standards of Nazi ideology, is ‘degenerate art’. He did this to juxtapose in a public setting the objective values of <em>good</em> and <em>bad.</em> Art deemed created by communists, Jews and the mentally unfit, among modernist and expressionist paintings that flourished in the 1920s Weimar Germany—were put on display to illustrate the <em>bad</em>, while classical art emphasising discipline, line and realism created by Aryan painters is the objective <em>good</em>. This racially pure art represents the spirit of German nationalism and the Third Reich.</p>
<p>The stifling treatment of the consensual and voluntary nature of esthetic art by Hitler degrades its democratic attributes. As Paul Klee suggests, treatment of art in opposition of its voluntarily nature strips the community of agency. Klee— one of the artists displayed at the gallery—was deployed to represent ‘mental inferiority’.</p>
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