This indictment is a classic; audiences have been upset about new art ever since humankind first picked up a brush. But what does this anger actually mean for artists, and for the world around them?
Within the past ten or fifteen years, the world of internet memes has exploded to the point where online microcultures have developed their own niche content economies, so to speak. Even ‘mainstream’ memes are often inaccessible to newcomers, referencing other memes which pop up, become viral, and stop circulating entirely all within a matter of months. There are some cross-cultural topics of ridicule, however, one of the most popular of the past ten or so years being contemporary art. These memes tend to conflate modern art with contemporary art, almost exclusively using the former term to refer to pieces which fall into the latter category. For the sake of clarity, I’ll go over the difference briefly here: modern art is the term for works and movements from the late 19th and early 20th centuries which are notable for having broken away from prevailing realist styles, and contemporary art refers to work made during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, up to and including art that is made now. In both cases, the art being described was revolutionary and challenging at the time of its making, and this challenge was often a crucial, conscious part of the movement or work. In short, modern art is an epoch of art history which has ended, whereas contemporary art is the art of today.
To memers and other online critics, however, this distinction is irrelevant. The term ‘contemporary art’ appears very rarely in the kind of sarcastic polemic that I’m used to seeing occasionally on all different kinds of online platform. Even professional artist and art teacher Robert Florczak, in his video entitled Why is Modern Art so Bad?, uses the terms interchangeably, making use of a couple of famously controversial contemporary pieces to support his argument. Though many memers claim to make their objections on aesthetic grounds, this conflation of terms and the overall ignorance and indifference it speaks to is gives the lie to this assertion; most combatants of ‘modern’ art today are not really offended by the works of widely lauded modernist painters, like Van Gogh, but rage against contemporary works like Tracey Emin’s My Bed, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog, or Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Your classic primary-colored squares, in the style of minimalists like Yves Klein, are also a favorite target. These criticisms tend to remove contemporary works from their history and context and compare them with older works, sometimes of modern artists like Picasso, but more often with examples of Renaissance- or Romantic-era realism. This comparison is evident in the ubiquitous art museum/dinner party/comedy routine comment about Jackson Pollock, the meat of which seems to be that there is no evidence of conventional artistic skill in his works.
This is particularly infuriating to people who make it a hobby, apparently, to check in on international art auctions every once in a while just to get mad about how much contemporary pieces are selling for. These authors tend to refer to contemporary art as a ‘con’ and artists as magnificently clever ‘scammers’ who have somehow tricked museums, private collectors, and art schools into believing that their ‘pretentious junk’ is worth buying and studying. This argument is invariably accompanied by a comment about how every person who says they like or understand contemporary art is actually just making it up in order to look cool, like this article from “Glen Coco” at Vice. Not only are contemporary artists cold-blooded con men who “know they’re full of shit and what they’re doing is totally fucking ridiculous,” but having a positive or complex reaction to contemporary art is apparently so impossible that anyone who claims to have done so must be lying. Essentially, this mode of thought frames all art produced within the past hundred years, with some exceptions, as fundamentally suspect, and artists as leech-like forces who use their ‘art’ to corrupt modern aesthetic sensibilities and trick people and institutions out of their money.
Ultimately, the effect of this argument is to prime people for a certain kind of closed-mindedness, in which anything apparently strange or outrageous in the world of art provokes immediate ridicule, rather than careful examination of the work and the sense of confusion or discomfort it provokes. Though haters of contemporary art act like they mostly write their articles and make their YouTube rants for the joke, this tactic has been used intentionally before, to much more sinister purpose. The most egregious example of this is the campaign against modern art waged by the National Socialist party during the first years of their rule in Germany, before the outbreak of WWI. Just like Robert Florczak and “Glen Coco,” the Nazis’ main target was the boundary-breaking work that was new in their time, that is, modern art movements like Surrealism and Impressionism. The artists who took part in modernism were seen as the agents of a nefarious force (in the Nazi context, this force was naturally international Judentum, aka Judaism or ‘Jewry’) whose goal was to corrupt German culture, especially standards of beauty, and steal German money. Sound familiar?
Also similar to the rhetoric of today’s anti-contemporaries was the method of argument used to convince the German people, many of whom had been highly involved in cultural modernism during the Weimar period (think Cabaret), to turn against modern art: ridicule. In 1937, the Nazi government organized a show called the Degenerate Art Exhibition (die Ausstellung „Entartete Kunst”) in which they displayed numerous modern works, seized from German museums and private collectors, by artists such as Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann, Kirchner, Chagall, and Van Gogh.
Video footage of the original Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, 1937
Many of the artists exhibited fled the country; a year after the opening, Kirchner killed himself. The works themselves were crowded together in dim, cluttered rooms, and the labeling, such as it was, emphasized the artist’s position or status in pre-Nazi society, which museum or private collection the piece was seized from, and the price at which it had been originally purchased. These often ridiculously high prices were quoted without mention of the fact that a majority of the sales had occurred during the six years of wild hyperinflation which afflicted the Weimar Republic following the end of WW1, and had not been adjusted to the value of the since-stabilized mark. On top of this, the walls of the exhibition were painted with insulting slogans and pejorative gallery names, such as “mockery of the German woman— ideal: cretin and whore,” “conscious sabotage of the military,” “German farmers seen from a Yiddish perspective,” “Jewish yearning for the desert is vented,” “take Dada seriously! It pays,” “crazy at any price,” and “this is how sick minds viewed nature.” The Nazis even reportedly hired actors to loudly and passionately disparage the art in order to encourage derision in the exhibition’s other visitors.
In a sense, these tactics are the pre-Internet equivalent of videos, memes, and articles deriding contemporary art; they set up an ‘appropriate’ reaction, which is easy to imitate, and invoke a sense of peer pressure that encourages people to do so. For example, if a visitor to the Degenerate Art exhibition were to attempt to speak up for the art shown there, they would have had to be prepared to go up against the official line of the Nazi party, the ‘evidence’ against modern art scrawled on the gallery walls, and the opinions of their friends, family members, and even of strangers hired to argue with them. The effect of all of this, ultimately, was to make supporting modern art during the Nazi period a nearly impossible task, and to strengthen and universalize the ‘anti’ argument to such a point that opposition did not throw it into doubt, but rather served as proof of the opposer’s impurity. More than anything, the Nazi party completely crushed the possibility that an average, working class German might enter a modern art gallery without preconceptions about what they were going to see there, spend time with a piece of work, and find personal or individual meaning in it.
This was a crucial accomplishment for the Nazis, because in the pre-war years their ability to retain supremacy relied upon effective elimination of the modern way of thinking about the self which had, by 1900, completely permeated German society. In the modern age, the self was constituted of an inward reliance — a faith in personal reason and judgement as sources of knowledge, obligation, and duty. This idea is very familiar to all of us; we hear it repeated constantly, from the elementary school classroom to the urgent anti-fascist reminder: think for yourself, be yourself, examine your surroundings, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. For the Nazi regime, as for any totalitarian effort, this ideology was a major threat, inextricably interwoven into the fabric of modern art and culture.
Any non-realist painting, even something so apparently innocuous as a Van Gogh self-portrait (one of which, incidentally, was too valuable to be destroyed and was therefore sold to foreign buyers after being confiscated), was laden with potent individualism and ambiguity. Such a work jeopardized the Nazi conception of a pure, objective reality in which Germans were the unanimous master race, and, as Hitler once said, there was “only one eternal art that has validity: namely, Greco-Nordic art.” (For Hitler, of course, the German race was physically and culturally descended from the haven of athleticism, realism, and racial purity that was ancient Greece). A piece of modern art represented the distinctive perspective of its creator, and often of its subject, thereby affirming the existence of the individual in the modern sense, and also evincing the fact of beauty and genius in members of other ‘races.’ A non-realist artwork could also, perhaps even more dangerously, jeopardize the notion that all pure ethnic Germans shared an inherent taste and love for the homeland by provoking differing interpretations in people who were supposed to be entirely homogenous.
The Nazi effort to suppress modern art was in the long run relatively successful. The Degenerate Art exhibition, with all its accoutrements, was immensely popular, and many important modernist works were permanently destroyed or hidden in such a way that they have not yet been recovered (as an example: it was not until 2012 that some 1500 missing works, including pieces by Dix, Matisse, Chagall, Kirchner, and others, were discovered in a private residence in Munich). What modern art could have implied to a serious viewer, namely proof of individuality, criticism of German cultural institutions, and points against the existence of a master race, could have destabilized Nazi rule, and so the regime mobilized against it. Their plan of attack (besides the obvious anti-semitism)? Vitriolic humor, evidence of financial abuses, and pure ridicule, the very same tools which haters of contemporary art today employ in their thinkpieces and on their meme pages.
Naturally, I am not suggesting that these two situations are identical. The crushing of modern art during the pre-war Nazi period was the result of a repressive, top-down campaign led by a powerful regime. Today’s atmosphere of detached ridicule and contempt, both online and off, for those who care about or believe in or even just like to look at contemporary art, is nothing but a heavy cloud, hovering anonymously over our culture. It is not reflected in the policies or actions of Western government; our museums remain open — I recommend you visit them. Our living artists and art students are still permitted to make art, and show it, and sell it. Nobody with the power to prevent them has decided, yet, that they would like to — or, taking notes from the Nazi case, the people who would like to have simply not risen to power yet.
In Germany, too, only five years before the Degenerate Art exhibition, modern art flourished; for example, in 1932 post-Expressionist sculptor Joachim Karsch went to the summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where he won a bronze medal for a work called Stabwechsel (baton exchange) in one of the now-defunct art categories. Popular opinion was, if not passionate about, at least tolerant of modern artists and their activities. There were murmurings, of course, satirical cartoons and magazine articles, but artists still made art, and showed it, and sold it. Not until the opening of the Degenerate Art exhibition itself in June of 1937 did German artists, including some of those, like Kirchner, who were ultimately the most impacted, finally and completely comprehend that they were to be shut out of the future of their country for good. Up until the Nazi seizure of power, anti-modern rhetoric was fringe, a kind of joke, just like anti-contemporary trolls are today, but it was present. It affected culture. It prepared people who before 1933 didn’t really care either way about modern art to be convinced by Nazi rhetoric, to become the well-dressed, mildly shocked, morally upstanding museum-goers that video footage from the Degenerate Art exhibition shows.
The art that was being made in the early 20th century held the key to exposing the lies woven into Nazi promises of unity and security; a culture of mockery, slowly built to a point of overwhelming noise, was all it took to keep Germans from realizing it. This same culture of mockery is present, in an early, quiet stage, in the way we talk about contemporary art today. The artists of our time are, like those of 75 years ago, trying to say something to us through their work. Funny-picture-making angry-article-writing forces unknown on the fringe of internet media culture are churning out content which unobtrusively but unquestionably denies the existence of such a message. So: what is it we’re being told not to see? Will that instruction escalate, become mainstream, become law? And who will our ignorance benefit when it does?
As in so many things, the Nazi period can be brutally instructive; its worst abuses hold valuable, gleaming fragments of truth. We need perspective if we are to decode the tangled mess that is the present political moment, and it is to history that we look for these crucial lessons. We should be careful not to ignore this one.