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I read this post with something close to physical revulsion. (It is the culture wars thread so perhaps that's par for the course.) Not because I dislike those older pictures, I love them. I don't even like Novus Angelus that much. But Klee is a for-real artist who devoted his life to his work and if you look across his oeuvre, you can't deny he was pursuing his interests and exploring interesting themes with craft and intensity and a deep aesthetic sense. To think that an example of his work would be corrupting to teenagers, 'evil' or 'filth' is offensive in its own right. He was great artist even if you don't like the work. And you certainly don't have to find it beautiful. But "filth"? "Evilness"? Absolutely, disqualifyingly, ridiculous.
How will a teenager be benefited from Novus Angelus? Klee may have been a great artist, but did he use his talents to create something helpful or harmful to his fellow man in this case? Fritz Haber was a brilliant and accomplished scientist, but that doesn’t mean his work creating chemical weapons wasn’t evil.
I saw it as a teenager in reproduction. I was very interested in how someone who was really into making drawings, philosophy and music and ceaselessly inventing new styles was villified by the Nazis as creating 'degenerate art' despite the inquisitiveness and sometimes humour of his overall project.
Did I gain from viewing that individual image by itself? Not really. It's not my favourite or anything. I'm arguing against the position it is harmful.
I'm sure that when the Nazis made lists of degenerate art they lumped in actual trash with good but ideologically inconvenient art. The art could easily both be bad and be on the list.
Lots of it may not have been good but probably none of it was degenerate, and probably degenerate art isn't really a thing.
Child porn. Snuff films, like "funky town". The cartoons of A Wyatt Mann. If these media had broad and growing audiences and were publicly celebrated by influential people, would you take that as a sign of broad social improvement?
Suppose the following statement is true: A major driver of the BLM movement was "art" that caused Blues to vastly overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed by police, thus spurring a social movement that attacked policing as a concept, leading to acute changes in how policing was conducted. The immediate result was a massive crime wave that killed many thousands of additional black people. If this be the case, would you agree that such art was bad for society?
Are you familiar with the youtube channels where people stream themselves scratching off lotto tickets and winning big? If you discovered that a young family member was a huge fan of such videos, and was also making a habit of dumping their free cash into lotto tickets, would you suppose there was a cause-and-effect relationship there? Would you consider this development good, bad, or neutral?
Do you recognize that art can be bad for society, that art can have a bad or immoral message or effect on the viewer? If not, why not? If so, what is your term for such art, and how is it fundamentally different from "degenerate"?
Art is powerful; this seems undeniable. If art is powerful, why would you presume that it is only powerful in good ways, and not in bad ones? Is that how you observe power working in any other context, ever?
I grant you that your examples are degenerate and at least some of them are kinds of art. But they aren't what the Nazis called "degnerate art", which was, broadly, all modern and abstract art, as well as art done by Jews, people with mental illnesses, Communists etc. This art was deemed evil largely independently of its content or intention, but because of who did it and the fact it was in styles other than the approved realist style. I don't think this was a coherent concept, and the elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad was all kinds of fucked up.
I realise I should have used my words more here instead of saying degenerate art wasn't a thing, as I have caused you to write quite a lot of stuff I fully agree with. Art is vitally important and has moral valence. It can be powerful in bad ways as well as good. That just doesn't apply (at all) to Klee, and a new term needs to be found for art with a clearly pernicious effects as with some of your examples. The Nazis have claimed "degenerate art".
On the one hand, I do not consider Nazis to be intellectual authorities. On the other hand, I'm informed that Hitler drank water.
I am moderately confident that art can't be bad simply because of who made it, but note that "who made it" and "what they made" correlate very, very strongly. I find it difficult to separate Russian or Chinese "soviet realist" art from my knowledge of the regimes that produced it. I also observe that a whole lot of people don't like "Triumph of the Will" or "Birth of a Nation", not because these works are badly made, but because of who made them and why. I would agree that mere identity is a very poor place to start one's critique of an art piece, and generally says more about the critic than the piece.
I'm skeptical that even the Nazis didn't care about the intention of the art and only who made it; can you point to some examples of art the Nazis considered "degenerate" that was obviously intended for and effectively executed on glorification of the Nazi state, but which was rejected due to the identity or chosen style of the maker?
I am not confident that "degenerate art" involves an elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad. I think one could claim aesthetically pleasing art as morally bad, and thus "degenerate". "aesthetically pleasing" is a very broad category; I would imagine that there are a lot of people who do or easily could view detailed depictions of their perceived enemies being tortured to death as "aesthetically pleasing."
I observe that Communists do not appear to "claim" concepts or terms the way you argue Nazis "claim" "Degenerate Art", so I don't really buy this idea that terms ought to be considered polluted in this way in a general sense. Perhaps we should consider it a term of art, and that we are in apparent agreement that who made a piece of art isn't a good place to start critiquing it from. We need a term for "bad art", this one seems reasonably straightforward and understandable. On the other hand, I'm not super attached to the word either; "anti-social" or "corrosive" seem reasonable synonyms.
In any case, if art can be "degenerate", that does not imply that all art labeled "degenerate" is accurately labeled; humans can be mistaken or lie, and I think we would agree that the Nazis did plenty of both. The Nazis labelling Klee's art "degenerate" does not make it so, but it doesn't make it not so either. I've written elsewhere in the thread describing the non-marginal value I'm able to glean from Klee's work; on the other hand, I think there's a pretty strong argument that the art world as a sociopolitical cluster has been strongly net-degenerate/anti-social/corrosive for at least the century, and as a prominent builder of that sociopolitical cluster, one can reasonably assess Klee for his contributions to that trend.
It seems to me that a lot of defenses of Klee are going to involve arguments that appear to me, at this point, to be special pleading. I think we are well past the point where naked appeals to diversity of thought and free expression can be maintained; values-incoherence is too obviously a serious problem, and values-policing is too endemic for these old arguments to hold up.
For identity, the closest thing I can find to an example is the famous one. Photography of a Nazi delegation to the League of Nations isn't intended to glorify the Nazi state, but it at least recognized them as newsworthy, and it seemed to be viewed positively enough by Goebbels before he learned the photographer was Jewish, then not so positively afterward. I would be surprised to find an example of exactly what you're looking for, but not because I'd expect the Nazis to have made "oh he's one of the good ones" exceptions for pro-Nazi art, just because they were clear enough about most of their bigotry that I wouldn't expect to see their targets making pro-Nazi art in the first place.
For "chosen style", you might be able to find something pro-Nazi, but expressionist, from before the Nazis came down clearly against non-realist art styles? Emil Nolde was apparently an anti-semite since WWI, and a Nazi supporter since the 1920s, but that didn't stop them from seizing a thousand of his paintings in the late 30s. His 1910 "Wise and Foolish Virgins" ended up in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition, and while one might imagine Nazis just recoiling from Jesus' parables like vampires from the cross, as best as I can tell their objection to Nolde was solely to the expressionist style. I can't actually find references to pro-Nazi paintings of his, though, just letters.
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Basically Hitler wanted to ban modernist experimentation and for artists to stick with existing, perfectly good thank you styles. Klee wanted to experiment with things like colour theory. This is not the kind of transgression I would consider capable of being morally bad.
I mean you can see the painting by Klee that was in the Degenerate Art exhibition. It's a picture of a fish, painted in a cool style. I struggle to see this as having any political or moral valence at all, but yes, that's because the water I swim in is tolerant of different styles as a very basic value. I guess this is controversial now.
For his role in the art industry, and the art industry often being pretty insufferable, sure, it's reasonable to give Klee a little blame. But it's a homeopathic dose.
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