07-30-2020, 10:35 PM
(07-29-2020, 01:19 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Nazis excoriated modern art and music as degenerate -- breaking from conventional molds easy for the Common Man to accept. Of course, art that devolves to popular taste at its lowest level, convention with some unimaginative use of symbols, is Kitsch, "art" intended to soothe and charm an audience that prefers to do little thinking when it encounters images.The Nazi's burned some junk art but mainly kept the best and most valuable for themselves so to speak.
Modern art, then even Impressionist art (eighty years ago people had yet to recognize Impressionist painting as the second-greatest era of painting, second only to the Renaissance, at least as is shown in bidding wars for art pieces up for sale), intends to jar people out of their complacency about the 'real' world in which they live. Abstraction is the reality behind nature, and expressionism conveys unsettling ideas. The movie starlet that a studio presents as a virgin is all too often a harlot in real life. Military glory has pain and dismemberment as the reality behind it. Decadence lies behind the alleged grandeur. Jazz recognizes that the highly-refined classical music is not the only expression of life, and atonal music suggests uncomfortable chaos. This is all inconsistent with the over-simplified world of the fascists (including Nazis and the KKK).
Under a totalitarian regime, thought is to become simple -- because life is glorification of official ideals and repudiation of anything that gets in the way. (It is paradoxical, but although Lenin fostered modern art as an expression of political as well as technological progress, Stalin's socialist realism also became an oversimplification of aesthetic expressions of his ideology, so 'modern' art and music had to go into hiatus under Stalin in favore of hackneyed expressions of the official ideology of Stalinism).
For the Nazis art was either comforting conventionality easily marketed to people who little think of art (again, Kitsch), classical expressions that suggested continuity from various stages of German history that the Nazis couldn't bring themselves to loathe, overt propaganda... or trouble. The German Nation and of course Volk were to be honored and never brought to question. Military glory was an objective in its own right, and of course the Fuehrer himself and his inner circle were to be seen as unqualified heroes. Many of the creators and promoters of modern culture were Jews, so that was good enough cause to despise it. Modern art was, of course, trouble.
