Art de jour

For the good of the German people, Hitler took it upon himself to expose the Germans to the best art possible, and shield them from the atrocities that he saw committed upon canvases. The good art, he discerned, was art that exhibited the purest and most perfect human forms; the art that celebrated the serenity in days of past; and the art that inspired hope for a renewed German culture. Additionally, he sought out paintings and sculptures that depicted distorted faces or forms. Even paintings with distorted perspectives were considered wrong. Works of art by Jewish artists were the most condemned of all the “bad” art. Hitler was not alone in this endeavor, either. Others sought to vilify “bad” art by comparing the distorted faces to photos of disfigured men. The artists, they argued, must be sick themselves to have painted the likenesses of such people. To further make his point, Hitler arranged for a gallery of these confiscated works to be put on tour before they were eventually burned. Although Hitler may have actually been offended by the artistic style of some of these works, it is abundantly clear (partly in thanks to Cohen’s work), that his treatment of art was very political.

(However, before we get too deep into analyzing Hitler’s political motives and the tragic end of many of these pieces, we should consider this: what exactly is bad art? Frankly, I don’t know. We can assign value to the perfection of a drawing and its relative likeness to the real thing, or we could look for the subtle distortions of the subject that artistically bring our attention to something less obvious. We could also evaluate a work in relation to its era—was the work stylistically before its time? Does it demonstrate three dimensional perspective? Or we could assess how the work makes us feel. For that matter, who says that art even is meant to be good or bad? Maybe its only meant to please the artist. My point is, leaving aside Hitler’s political motives (I’ll come back to those), art is too subjective for us to judge whether Hitler’s choices of good and bad had any merit. It is entirely possible that what he chose was actually what he thought was good. As for his political motives, he is hardly the first ruler to have dictated his opinion about good and bad art. For centuries, artists (including authors and musicians) have been banned for political reasons.)

Now what of Cohen? I will argue that his film was definitely a form of political art. In the same way that Hitler chose pieces which would best support his argument against the Jews, Cohen chose pieces which best support his argument. Certainly it would be difficult to choose film clips that didn’t illustrate Cohen’s point and I am not suggesting that Cohen is biased. However, Cohen’s work has an intent to inform and to persuade, and is therefore political in nature.