Amanda D. Post #4

Amanda Dhillon

1. The danger of art, it seems, is in its ability to persuade and impassion people. As Plato discusses in the Republic, book X, art has the power to draw up emotion in people, which in turn can create conflict. This would be extremely threatening to an authoritarian regime, which can not exist without harmonious obedience by the citizens. Such emotions caused by art that run contrary to the ideals of the regime can easily lead to resistance and, as Plato points out, a lack in rational thought. “Rational” thought is normally a key component in authoritarian regimes (at least, for the leaders and thinkers in such societies), and so any art that causes people to act on emotions rather than reason is dangerous and undesirable.

Additionally, an authoritarian thinker would believe some kinds of art can also cause societal deterioration. Hitler decides this to be so in his inaugural speech for the “Great German Art Exhibition.” Art can promote the “wrong” values for a society, which would lead to its cultural demise and prevent it from rising up in greatness. A people, according to Hitler, are represented throughout the ages by their art, and degenerate art does not make eternal the “good” values of the society. Through its ability to influence, potentially in a way that inhibits the proliferation of the ideology and values that an authoritarian regime would like to see in its citizens, art can be a threat to the stability of the authoritarian state, causing dissent and disharmony.

2. Fernand Leger, a French cubist (as well as follower of many other modern art movements), seems to often depict humans in a modern society, focusing primarily on the human and machine, and through his art, Leger tries to encourage his own humanist attitude toward the world. Formally, his art changes styles over time, but overall it seems to retain a cubist influence, with geometric shapes dominating the objects in the frame. The beauty of the human figure appears to be in its relation to the machine, the relationship with new technologies of the modern world, and how the body can also be mechanical. Several of Leger’s pieces feature conical and tubular human figures, while (seemingly) a small handful show the influence of the commonly described cubist form: flat, geometric shapes that create simplified yet distorted human figures but show an appreciation of the usage of space and a new, one-dimensional depiction on canvas.

1. Based on the readings, degeneracy is the term applied to social aspects that have fallen below or run counter to the ideals of the Nazi regime. In the case of art, degenerate art is that which encourages “non-German” values or morals and does not fit the government standards for beauty. When applied directly to the society, degeneracy seems to be any group that does not fit the Nazi description of “German” and therefore became (in the Nazi mind) as a sort of filth or disease that would cause the decay of the “good” German nation. Essentially, then, the Nazi concept of “degeneracy” is anything that causes the deterioration of or prevents the success of the Nazi ideological views and beliefs of proper German morals, values, and society.
2. Hitler probably would have seen degeneracy in both the style and message/purpose of the artwork of the modern era. This would be due to several formal factors, most apparent being the distorted human forms and unnatural depictions of nature and scenery. Especially because of his own failure at a formal art education, Hitler would have looked upon many of these modern pieces with bitterness and seen degeneracy because of his inability to understand why these distorted images achieved such massive success when he could not. Beyond this, though, Hitler would have found the warped human figures to be particularly disgusting. These images undermine the Nazi campaign for a perfect race of “beautiful” Germans, a people who would embody the classical ideals of beauty and the perfectly chiseled human form. The rearranged and highly altered humans in the new wave of modern art styles threatened the spread of these strict standards of beauty and allowed the minds of the German public to deviate from the ideals that the Nazi party wanted to unify them under.
3. So many of the Nazi policies centered around the creation of the “perfect” German/Aryan race, and the depiction of the body in modern German art was quite distanced from this ideal. Hitler describes in his inaugural speech of the “Great German Art Exhibition” that art is “founded [. . .] only on peoples” and therefore represents them as an “eternal monument.” The greatness of the perfect, idealized representation of the people of Hitler’s Germany throughout time is therefore lessened by the disfigured human forms in modern art. Since Hitler does not want to promote this deranged human figure as the symbol of the national standards of ideal, Aryan beauty (and does not want his German people to be immortalized in this way), many of his claims of degeneracy would be connected with the body in modern art. Beyond this, Hitler makes the case that the artists who create these works are themselves social degenerates who “see the […] population” of his state as “rotten cretins.” With this view, he creates the excuse that the “corruption” of the German people comes in part from these “so-called ‘artists’” who must, Hitler feels, have an “eyesight-deformation” and who create “misinterpretations” and “false illusions” of the way that the people of his nation ought to look and be represented. Because of its association with deformations, malfunctions, and overall ugliness, and Hitler’s extreme campaign to suppress and liquidize these traits, the body in modern art gets labeled as something degenerate that will cause the German society to decay from the inside out.
4. As Mosse says, it is easy for beauty represented through sensuality, in the arts especially, to become threatening to a tight social order. When a piece of artwork, regardless of the medium, has the power to compromise the “respectability” (Mosse 25) that a society like Nazi Germany is balanced upon, the sensual element in the art is in direct contradiction to the moral glue of the state and can wear it away, potentially causing a collapse in the public unity that is so essential to a nation like Nazi Germany. Sensuality displayed publicly in art exhibits for the viewers the traits which the Nazi government would have considered abnormal or degenerate. For example, “sexual excess” (Mosse 26) is an abnormal behavior in the Nazi mind, and in displaying sensuality in the human figures in art is a rejection of the social and sexual norm, which is a “classical” and modest figure that adheres to the morals and values that society is based upon. Therefore, the display of these sensual images poses a threat to the unity of the community around what are considered social and sexual norms, namely morality and modest virtues, and since “public representation is political representation,” (Mosse 29) it is integral to the cohesion of the government and social structure to maintain the universal Nazi ideals of a beauty that lacks sensuality and as a result, bind the population around this one ideal and prevent a social degeneracy. Beauty “removed from all materialism and sensuality” (Mosse 29) would therefore be the central ideal of societal normality, and all would unify around it, providing a stable social order and avoiding the moral abnormalities.

3. http://www.cynthiaaldrichpottery.com/Images/recent2.jpg

This sculpture entitled Justice? is a piece which has the potential to cause the problems which authoritarian thinkers would fear to be a result of political art, namely disharmony and a fracture in the political/ethical cement that otherwise unifies a people. The figure exemplifies what many US citizens believe (correctly or incorrectly) about the war in Iraq, suggesting that it is not justified despite the “excuses” made by the government for the attack and invasion. The image of Justice shielding her own eyes over the issue is liable to cause an emotional stir amongst the people, whether it is over agreement with the message of the piece or outrage against its lie, which would divide and separate them, causing resistance against each other and the government, and conflict and resistance are always a threat to any social or political order. The sculpture also suggests that the people should evaluate the morality of the government’s intervention in Iraq through displaying the artist’s opinion that there is no justice in the decision to go to war. The government’s excuses are etched deeply, almost painfully, into the figure of Justice and she has dropped her golden scale, representing the cutting, damaging political lies and promoting the ethical value of a certain standard of morality that the American public should uphold. It would seem that the sculpture urges them to contemplate what that value of “justice” which our nation is so fond of really means, and whether or not it is being carried out by the US government, which is supposedly founded on the ideals of equality and truth. According to this piece, the values that our society claims to be based on have been lost upon this war (represented through the “lost” scale that has fallen to the floor, abandoned beside the figure of Justice). Thus, the symbolism of this sculpture is the means through which the art displays the ethical responsibilities of the people and the values that they should consider reassessing in the case of the war in Iraq.