This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link