The Death and Rebirth Of Art
The Degenerate to DEI Pipeline
George Grosz, Communists Fall and Shares Rise, 1919
A few things the algorithm has shown me this week:
First up is this gem, an interesting, and wholly predictable piece from Adrian Horton, the US Arts editor at the Guardian, with the totally neutral title Culture Wars: Trump’s Takeover of the Arts is Straight from the Dictator Playbook
Horton isn’t very pleased with Trump’s announcement that he would take over the crown jewel of DC’s cultural elite, The Kennedy Center. While Horton complains about the so-called fascistic power grab of Trump, she willfully ignores the absolute dumpster fire of the state of the art world as it’s currently composed (our next piece wonders if there is anything we can do about it).
Wasting no time, she starts her piece by paralleling Trump with the infamous “degenerate art” exhibit orchestrated by Adolf Hitler’s Reich in 1937 – the so-called degenerate art was part of a larger exhibit which showcased approved or idealized art made by artists that reflected Hitler’s vision of Aryan society and was meant to contrast unflatteringly against it. To say it missed its mark is to be generous.
The degenerate art exhibit was a resounding success, or failure, depending on your worldview. The public flocked to the degenerate art exhibit, and for good reason: People don’t like being lectured to. The public can sense when it is being fed propaganda, and they continually reject it. The degenerate art exhibit represented a bottom-up view of the world, by working artists struggling to capture the zeitgeist of a truly disruptive period in history, particularly in Germany, a land rocked by world war, runaway inflation, uncertainty, and great upheaval.
Government shouldn’t have a hand in art exhibition, and to the extent that it does, well, it should showcase art that uplifts the values of the state, after all, it’s government. My argument isn’t that Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center, which is essentially a government property, but that anybody looks to government for art at all.
With a lack of insight common to establishment cultural elite, Horton goes on to catalog oppressive regimes throughout history such as Stalin’s Soviet Union which “abolished independent artistic institutions, required cultural production to exist in absolute allegiance to the party.”
The key distinction here is that the left completely dominates and effectively freezes out conservative artists from any meaningful representation in the art world – essentially, they require “cultural production to exist in absolute allegiance to the party,” in this case, the party of the left. They’re not interested in Trump’s government influence in the arts, except that it upsets their hegemony – the truth is, they don’t want any competition at all, and in that light, they are the tyrants they claim to abhor.
Once again Horton shows that if you want to understand what the left is thinking, doing, plotting, and planning, it’s as foolproof as listening to what they say the right is doing, and inverting it. It works. Every. Single. Time. I’ve never been disappointed.
Which ties in perfectly to this next piece from the murky origins of Erebus Nyx, who claim to be an investment company “engineering the future of media, publishing, and art.”
Their piece, The Art World’s Ideological Monopoly: Why Right-Wing Artists Don’t Stand a Chance clearly illustrates the argument above but offers some promising solutions.
First, they explore the state of the art-machine – whether it’s institutions, museums, galleries, universities, whatever, these institutions, and those that run, finance, write about, or otherwise support, are hive-mind institutions loathe to cede any ground to art that doesn’t fit the narrative of whatever the left is peddling, in this case most recently, sacrosanct DEI.
They don’t have high hopes for a reversal of that stranglehold of established institutions. Their solution is to build successes outside of those closed systems, which isn’t as daunting as it may seem. This approach has very recent precedent in the way that Donald Trump was able to take his message to the people directly, through his Truth Social platform, Elon Musks’s makeover of Twitter into a more free speech marketplace, and the highly effective use of podcasts and rallies.
Those strategies in combination were potent solutions to bypassing the monolithic voice of traditional media and other outlets, creating alternative consumption opportunities for the public that was clearly starving for a new way to communicate away from the ossified, predictable, and heavy-handed legacy outlets. There’s no reason to believe the same won’t be true for art.
A more traditional example can be traced to one of the most consequential exhibits in art history, the so-called “Armory Show” of 1913. There, the public was introduced en masse to the works of Modern Artists whose works were nothing short of revolutionary.
There are many parallels to today’s art world – the artists were trying to make sense of new technologies and upheaval in the world and profoundly altered the direction of art ever since. Interestingly, the Armory Show was organized entirely through the efforts of a collective of artists and used no public funds to carry out their vision.
It is well past time for another Armory Show.
And finally, some good news out of Hollywood:
The Hollywood Report has a piece called DEI is Disappearing in Hollywood. Was it Ever Really Here?
Predictably championing DEI as either no big deal, or on the other extreme, a supremely important good, this piece laments once again Donald Trump’s outsized influence, not just in politics and the economy, but also art and culture.
Blessedly, the piece reports that “studios are ‘looking for content that appeals to a wider, more general audience,’” and “A lot of people are starting to wonder why Hollywood doesn’t resonate with the rest of America.”
A quick look at the
It’s easy to answer. Current DEI initiatives fall under the same argument as the one made above that people don’t like being lectured to. Movies these days aren’t so much art as they are sermons, with pieties made to “diversity” without the artistry and human connection that made art worthy of being called art.
Diversity isn’t a stand in analogue for the human condition. They’re not interchangeable, even as diversity is a part of humanity, the striving of humanity for meaning and purpose is a much higher ideal, and one that too often is overlooked by those with the power to greenlight projects.
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Dan Fleuette is a photographer, author, and filmmaker best known for his body of work with Steve Bannon and WarRoom.
His national best-seller Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws: A Pictorial History of WarRoom can be found on doitfluet.com
No AI machines were harmed in this writeup.