Hiding in Broad Daylight. Here on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
The political truth of Europe at this time was that democracy, faint and
pale, panted for its life on the fringes of the continent. Meanwhile, two tyrannosaurs
conjured by a common revolutionary spirit that had recently destroyed
and discarded entire empires, had been set against each other in the
historical arena. In this extraordinary situation the even more extraordinary
happens: Art, hitherto blowing petrol on every existing revolutionary fire in
Europe and elsewhere, ecstatically watching every vestige of old Europe going
up in flames, suddenly declares itself innocent. And as though that weren’t
even enough, it is now: The Victim!
The paintings of German expressionists — which to Thomas Mann had
seemed such dark foreboding of a fascism on the march — were now interpreted
as being mere internal landscapes, the objectified agony as it were of
the artist having to face the reality, as opposed to the fantasy, of revolution
and war. In no way should they be regarded as the very stimulus to the same.
Among futurists it was not acknowledged that the adulation of the machine
as the incarnation of the zeitgeist was in itself a declaration of war, paving
the way for men of action with precisely this in mind. Nowhere was there a
sense among artists of having been in the least unfair in their visceral criticism
of the bourgeois society. Nor were their unabashed provocations and
openly expressed rebuttal of capitalism and liberal republican values seen as
instrumental in the rise of European totalitarianism. No, the artists up to this
point had remained true to the calling of art by involuntarily turning into the
human seismographs registering the subterranean tremors announcing the
full-scale arrival of state sponsored political, social, and cultural terror.
Luckily for them, Germanic expressionists — whether an Emil Nolde, an
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, or a James Ensor — were exonerated from the task of
carrying on their work in the service of either Nazis or Bolsheviks. Their work
was famously dubbed ‘formalist’ by Soviet commissaries of art, and ‘degenerate’
by Nazi experts on eugenics. Likewise the Italian futurists were considered
too crazy even by Mussolini to be seriously considered for propagandist
purposes. Interestingly, Mussolini held the sound opinion that art and politics
were and should be two separate things, never to be combined, and that the
state therefore ought not to meddle in the business of art, as art should refrain
from getting involved in politics. This might be an important reason why the
frozen postures of social realism and propaganda art never became quite the
same hit in fascist Italy as in Germany and Russia, where the revolutionary
actors were incessantly idolised in this manner. Russian futurists in the Stalin
era had little choice but to conform to the nationalistic pathos and its predefined
aesthetic standards.
Since both Nazism and Soviet communism have since gone defunct,
contemporary democratic consensus takes for granted that there cannot be
a grain of historical truth in the critique of art these two systems generated
internally. Since fascism and communism obviously didn’t work out, everything
found within them must be considered an error and only be interesting
insofar as it maps out an historical dead end. It is, on the other hand, assumed
that there is no higher truth to be discovered in the realm of aesthetics than
the one guaranteeing the artist absolute freedom to do whatever pleases him.
More: That only the artist enjoying the highest degree of freedom is capable of
producing eternally modern and yet, paradoxically, timeless art. It has thereby
also been taken for granted that the artist himself is not going to abuse this
unconditional freedom by behaving irresponsibly in his art — as opposed to
in his personal life were transgression of bourgeois decorum is almost considered
de rigueur.
...
John D Rockefeller Jr., founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, began to systematically buy up avant-garde art in the 1920s. Over time
this resulted in a vast collection of contemporary works, at the time still waiting
to acquire political maturity. By the end of the Second World War it was
clear that Nazism had been permanently defeated while no more than an uneasy
truce had been obtained with Marxist Russia. The fate of precious modernism
again seemed uncertain. European modernism certainly had made
its mark on the general public. With a once again free and liberal Paris there
were hopes of a return of modernism to its most fertile soil. But since the
1920s things had changed. The United States, during its own phase of state
autocracy, personified by presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, had seemed to lag
behind in artistic awareness, having little more than its own brand of social
realism and middle class sentimentality to offer a discerning art world, eager
for the new, shocking and surprising. However, with America’s second intervention
in European affairs, which decidedly tipped the balance in favour of
the Allies, the time had come for the United States to not only demonstrate its
political and economic hegemony in the world, but also to become the cutting
edge in artistic modernism.
Artistic modernism. To most of us it would seem a separate universe with
its own esoteric intention and logic. What Lars Holger Holm shows in
this essay, however, is how intimately the development of various modern
artistic idioms, and their theoretical underpinnings, have been linked
to concomitant social revolutions and to the highly politicised,
theoretical, even racial agendas, entertained by people in the highest
places. He also demonstrates how big money has thoroughly perverted art
and artists, turning the latter into simple con men performing their
charades to a whole world of spectators, manipulated by financial
institutions, press, politicians and the media alike into believing that
the contemporary art scene really ought to have some kind of meaning...
And it does. Only, it's not artistic but exclusively financial and political. Buy the book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Hiding-Broad-Daylight-Radicalisation-Commercialisation-ebook/dp/B00VITFM7I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467106029&sr=8-1&keywords=holm+hiding+in+broad+daylight#nav-subnav
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