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."