The picture here is doing the rounds on social media, and it has annoyed me, and I thought I’d explain why.
I could start by justifying or explaining the two later artworks or putting them in context, or somesuch, but I’m going to look at the facts about the artists, the Facebook page sharing the meme, and Nazis.
The four pieces of art are Starry Night by Van Gogh, the Mona Lisa by da Vinci, Untitled 1974 by Robert Ryman, and Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan.
Firstly, the facts. Neither Robert Ryman nor Maurizio Cattelan have degrees. The premise of the meme – that these high-falutin’ artists who have gone to fancy colleges and are probably woke tofu-eaters – is simply, factually wrong. Cattelan, so far as I can tell, did not attend any higher education institute. Ryman spent a year at the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and then a year at the George Peabody College for Teachers.
Van Gogh worked for an art dealer in the Hague and then London, studied artists like Paul Gaugin, and attended the Belgian Royal Academy of Fine Arts. There’s vastly more to Van Gogh, but to imply he didn’t have education, let alone formal education, in arts is just bunkum. The situation with da Vinci is rather different. I don’t think it would have been possible for Leonardo to study art at university in the fifteenth century, because there weren’t any universities teaching it – you’d have joined the Guild of St Luke – as the faculties at the time were Roman law, canon law, theology, philosophy, and medicine.
This doesn’t particularly matter, other than in terms of being technically correct – the best sort of correct – but it’s worth considering why someone is putting out this bullshit. I should clarify that I mean bullshit in the technical sense – it’s not that it’s false, but that the person behind it doesn’t care whether it’s true or false so long as it serves their purpose.
So, let’s look at the Facebook page from where the meme is being shared. It is called Click It News*†. It was previously called Click It Conservative News – nothing wrong with that; some of my best friends are conservatives. However, if we look at what they post, we get an idea of where they’re coming from. The most recent post links a store being raided to the Democrats; the next most recent links the Democrats to the recently-collapsed FTX bitcoin thing; and so on. It promotes Dinesh D’Souza, asks why liberals are so annoying, complain about the woke, implies trans people are predators, and so on. It’s not conservative in any meaningful sense of the word – it’s populist, Trumpian, and reactionary. It is deliberately stoking the culture wars.
I’m going to go one further – it’s fascist or, at least, leaning towards fascism.
From the 1920s on, the Nazis described much modern art as Entartete Kunst – ‘degenerate art’. It connects to the idea of cultural Bolshevism, as well, of course, as anti-Semitism, and it carries a lot with it, but part of the payload is that it is not ‘proper’ art, that it is too clever by half, and that it has some malign purpose towards introducing foreign substances into our precious bodily fluids. It is pretty explicitly anti-intellectual.
I think the same thing is going on here. Now, not everyone who uses the term woke is using it in a similar manner to cultural Bolshevism in the first half of the twentieth century but a lot, wittingly or not, are. In this post, the anti-intellectualism is absolutely there, as is the implication that all this modern rot isn’t proper art and things were better in the good old days. All this university education isn’t doing us any favours.
It’s a catchy meme. A lot of art today isn’t very good. Look at this silly thing.
I don’t think Cattelan’s work is particularly interesting and, frankly, it’s derivative. The other work he’s famous for is a gold toilet, titled ‘America’. The message is obvious and banal.
However, a lot of art at the time of da Vinci or Van Gogh also wasn’t very good. We don’t remember it, because it’s not worth remembering 150 or 500 years later. I rather doubt we’ll be remembering Cattelan’s banana in 2522, although I hope that we do remember the painting Guernica.
It’s not a fair or meaningful comparison, but it’s easy to do, and puts out the idea that these are dust-eclipsed days.
It’s the same tactic that Paul Joseph Watson used in his video† about modern art, which was pretty close to complaining about Entartete Kunst – not just in the core message, but in using something that seems harmless to entice people into going thoughtlessly down their line of thinking. It’s similar to Britain First’s habit of asking people to share their posts in favour of veterans, animal rights, motherhood, and apple pie.
I don’t know whether Click It News would meet any given definition of fascism. A quick look suggests that it is leaning that way, though, and in the current environment pushes people towards it and towards less extreme but still dangerous positions.
This is a long way of saying ‘check what you’re sharing before you share it’ – for facts, for where it’s from, and why the person sharing it wants you to share it. Sometimes it’s because cats are cute. Sometimes, it’s because there’s a message, and they don’t always want you to be aware you’re receiving a message. It’s not that some people went to uni and then were a bit silly – it’s that these universities are dangerous, these times are bad, these people cannot be trusted.
* – I’m linking to this page for completeness etc, but it’s not one I’d recommend visiting.
† – you can find it online easily enough. I’m not linking to it.