Class #16 postgame

EXCELLENT CONTRIBUTION TO THE HARVEST, COMRADES:

The level of participation in class today was great!

IDEAS DRAFT:

Thursday night, comrades! Friday morning at the latest. We must meet our quota for the next harvest!

HERE'S WHERE ALL THE NAZI-APPROVED ART LIVES ON THE INTERNET:

1055 images here (painting, sculpture, photography). Sadly I fear many of us are too racially degenerate to be able to appreciate it. Oh, and here's a Hitler original.

And here's an interesting/frightening radio story about the evolution of Neo-Nazism in today's Germany from a radical fringe movement to an increasingly mainstream political movement.

SOVIETS VS. NAZIS:

Can someone who took good notes remind me what we wrote on the board about the aesthetic/political similarities & differences? Here's what I remember:

-Soviet feminism vs. Nazi gender traditionalism
-Nazis using race to create a classless society vs. Soviets using "dictatorship of the proletariat" to create a classless society
-appeal to the collective will... it should be noted however that Soviets think everyone should be an artist whereas Nazis are more interested in regulating the production of a specific class of artists
-Soviet internationalism vs. Nazi nationalism (Soviet Union as "united states," Soviets consider nationalism & racism a bourgeois illusion)
-both use anti-capitalist rhetoric, but in different ways... in Germany it is often paired with anti-semitism, and it's not like the Nazis got rid of businesses altogether... I mean, think of Volkswagen for instance or the collaboration of the Nazis with Coca-Cola (no seriously)... vs. the entire basis of the Soviet Union is anti-capitalism... all the business are nationalized & state run
-Nazi's ambivalent attitude toward "modernity" in general and modern art in particular... the idea of a future return to a glorious past, nostalgia, with Weimar as a terrible wrong turn... vs. Soviets' total embrace of modernity (but Soviets didn't like some abstract styles of art because they found them confusing or symptomatic of bourgeois individualism... and remember, Soviets went right from being peasants under a monarchy to being communist revolutionaries... they didn't have that in between democratic / moderate phase, and they didn't want to continue any elements of the past)
-related... Soviet use of technological and urban imagery in their "realism" vs. Nazi's use of nostalgic and agrarian imagery in their "realism"
-use of propaganda... Soviets essentially believed that all art was political propaganda, while Nazis acted like only degenerate art was political (despite using art as political rhetoric themselves)

SENSUALITY VS. BEAUTY IN LONG BEACH:

This is the article Moeller was referring to about a dispute over a nude painting in Long Beach. I think my weirdo artist neighbor who lives next door actually knows this woman. (He's an interesting case in himself... he works as a painter on construction sites by day and paints art like this by night. Very Bauhaus I guess.)

IS THIS ART?:

Japanese water fountain.

SOMETHING ELSE TO PONDER:

I may use this for class discussion next week. Besides the M.I.A. + Jay-Z + Kanye + Lil' Wayne + T.I. and Radiohead + U.C.L.A. marching band mashups, the other interesting moment at the Grammys, to me, was the dull speech that the director of the organization gives every year. Except this time it wasn't dull because he called for the Obama Administration to create a cabinet level position for Secretary of the Arts (like Secretary of State, Treasury, Defense, Energy, etc.). Is this a good idea, because it would encourage greater funding for arts education? Or is it a bad idea for the political state to have regulatory power over the arts... isn't that what Hitler & Stalin are doing?