#(absolute art is the idea that literally every single piece of purposfully created stimuli is art)

[deadlydelicious]

God I did my whole first term masters theory on the Degenerate Art Exhibit so this is a special interest area of mine that gets me fired up.(and its why I am so aggressively pro ‘absolute art’ (aka the idea that anything is art) and so anti ‘modern art is bad’) because no fucking joke - ‘modern art is bad and useless’ is core fascist ideology. its literally one of their first building blocks facists lay down to route out ‘undesirables’ when taking over a culture.

So the Degenerate Art in Nazi Germany was both a label handed out by the Ministry of Propeganda against certain artists, and an actual exhibition staged by the Nazis. The exhibition toured over the years, but the first was held in 1937, and in the years leading up to it, the ministry of propeganda seized THOUSANDS of artworks. People talk about the Nazis burning books and stealing art, but they tend to think of the stolen art in terms of the Nazi plunder (aka hi-value art pieces being stolen from Jewish families or invaded countries and being distributed to party officals) but they forget that the Nazi's stole and destroyed thousands of artworks from living artists because they either saw the artists or the subject of the artwork itself as 'entartet' (degenerate). Officals from Goebbels Minstry of Propeganda oversaw the removal of hundreds of works of art from museums across the invaded territories throughout the war, and the raids of artists studios to steal and destroy art and arrest artists. Some of what wasn't destroyed was exhibited in the Degenerate Art Exhibit.

The exhbition was held in 1937 in Munich, and it was essentially the art equivalent of a 'freak show', as in ‘come look at these degenerate examples of art’, or ‘come look at the art made by degenerates’, to show Germans the stupid frivolous nature of art and build their case that modern artists were an economic drain and a danger to the pure ideal of Germany. The Nazis also hosted another exhibit across the street at the same time called the Great German art exhibition, which held all the neoclassical style art create by the Nazis offical artists, to show good Germans what proper art was.

Now why they showed the art is for a couple of reasons. You have to keep in mind that pre-nazi Weimar Germany was sort of a cultural hub for modern artists, so there were a lot of them, and it was also a country expiriencing MASSIVE economic issues, so the goal was to make these artists feel like the enemy - to say modern art was expensive and ridiculous. It was also importantly a move to try and silence a large portion of artists who were VERY traumatised by WW1 and were trying to depict that trauma through art, which the Nazi's hated because it ruined the image of the 'strong but wronged' German soldier they were trying to push in an effort to kick start their hostile takeover of Europe. Artists like Kathë Kollwitz creating memorials depicting grieving parents rather than matryed heros, or Ernst Balach depicting WW1 soldiers as emaciated terrified young boys huddling in the shroud of death didn't really back up Hitlers vision of the great German Ubermensch. Images and ideas that were seen to weaken the image and integrity of Germany and were therefore a threat to the powerful German state.

A lot of the artists who had their work seized spent the rest of the war being closely monitored by Goebbels men, with their ability to purchase art supplies or create art almost entirely denied, and some of them were arrested as political prisoners.

The V&A museum has a PDF of the full inventory of degenerate art avalibile online here

and I highly urge people to explore the work of the artists who had their work siezed, artists like Ernst Barlach, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Karl Schwesig, Otto Dix, Emil Nolde, and of course Kathë Kollwitz (who may or may not be my favourite artist of all time). They had their legacies destroyed by the actions of a fascist state, and they deserve for their art to be admired and remembered. As artists, legacy is often everything. Disrespect a Nazi today by honoring the legacy and voice of someone they wanted you to forget

Stop using the word degenerate to mean horny challenge