Saturday, August 29, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Art, Aesthetics and Absolute Power
Idee und Gestalt was the generic expression included in the title or subtitle of countless brochures and books produced by the Nazi ideologues. What National Socialism sought to highlight in both of it's models, Art and Christianity, was a process that was able to lead from idea to form. It was this process, placed under the direction of a fuhrer who presented himself as both the German Christ and the artist of Germany, that was designated by the expression "creative work."
Art, Aesthetics and Absolute Power
It was apparently left to the twentieth century not merely to produce artist-dictators but above all to give a normative justification for their existence by identifying political activity with artistic activity as a matter of principle. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt has rightly pointed out that the role played by art in the dictatorships of the twentieth century would have been fundamentally the same even without Hitler's particular passion for it. As early as 1934, Paul Valery justified this role when, in the preface to a work on the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar, he observed , "Politics always tends to treat people as things," and went on to declare," There is something of the artist in every dictator, and an aesthetic element in all his ideas. He has to fashion his human material and work on it, and make it suited to his designs."
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Friday, August 7, 2009
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