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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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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.

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 don't think this was a coherent concept, and the elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad was all kinds of fucked up.

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."

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".

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.

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

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.

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.