Daniel Benshana
The art arena always seems to be in some crisis, somewhere or everywhere. Reflecting, perhaps, the intellectual artistic and financial crises of so many artists down the ages. No less a crisis faced the world in the 2nd World War where culture was deeply involved in the ‘New German Man’, the ‘New Communist Man’ and the proud American. A war that continued into the Cold War and rippled down to our times with the unrelenting control mechanisms on the art arena as a centre of wealth creation and culture be damned.
We have witnessed Jewish people being attacked, vile grafitti being daubed and the rattles of a European war once again instigated by the Russia of Cossack-old. In the middle of this someone wants to paint, to sculpt, to build a beautiful building, write a wonderful new symphony, draw and/or write a novel. And yet others will bend their knee to the crowd and use their talents to promote the violent aims of their states. And no one knows if they will ever be brought to account
It was ever thus. Didn’t Archimedes die when a wall fell on him as he was reinforcing it against the invading Roman enemy? Are not all weapons functional and yet aesthetic? There are very few who grapple with the terrible beauty of weaponry which all have to ‘work’ in the same three dimensional, gravitational world in which we all exist. We do not do well to hide any facts from our children and one such, that Adolf Hitler painted and that two of his acolytes were art connoisseurs, should be dealt with by scholars. Hannah Arendt, when she talked about how ordinary fascists seemed to be, was the first to point out that an artist, a history teacher, a pilot and many others carried out the worst crimes in history. They were not kings, they were not heroes, nor men and women of great learning they were ‘us’. Us given more power to pursue our dreams than we have ever been given.
Elon Musk has been given that power, a modern, average neo-nazi, a man whose hobbies include playing video games and tweeting like, it seems, millions of others. J D Vance used to enjoy dressing up as a drag queen, Trump likes golf.
There is a truth here we need to acknowledge. Every vile person who ever existed was human and what they do and did is a part of our shared human history. If we pretend that ordinary people can never become monsters we deceive ourselves.