Talk:Degenerate art

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[edit] Russian degenerate art

I was listening to something about Stravinsky recently; apparently the Russian authorities considered certain things "degenerate art" too, such as jazz. -- Tarquin 15:15 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

I agree that the the article should be expanded to reflect such facts. At all times in modern history have figures of authority used their influence to define what is and what is not aesthetic or even "acceptable" art. However, as with so many things the Nazis brought things to a new level and introduced the term as we know it today. --snoyes 15:37 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)
I think that when talking about the Russians, the word "decadent" is more common than "degenerate". I'm not sure there's a lot of difference between the two in practice - both were applied to anything the authorities thought was dangerous for whatever reason - but "degenerate art", as far as I know, is usually taken to mean art branded as such specifically by the Nazis. There is something to be said about music here, though: composers such as Krenek and Goldschmidt were called "degenerate", I believe. But I'm really not an expert, and I could be wrong about all of this. --Camembert
My understanding is that the Russians used "decadent" as a pejorative, but what they were really after was "formalism." I don't understand Marxism well enough to go into much detail about formalism, but my vague understanding is that it had to do with being too abstract. Since under Soviet Communism all artists and composers were state employees, the Communist State wasn't about to finance experimental music for its own sake; things had to be accessible to the masses, what they deemed too outré was slapped with the "formalism" label. There is another sense of "decadent art", and that has mostly to do with the Symbolist movement; but this was mostly before the Soviet Union. ---Ihcoyc

Camembert, "Sachlichkeit" is "objectivity", I actually added the German title because I found "Neue Sachlichkeit" translated as "New Functionalism", and recongnized that this was a wrong tranlation (at least literally). (Translation: http://www.wordreference.com/de/en/translation.asp?deen=sachlichkeit ) It is entirely plausible that Neue Sachlichkeit New Functionalism are the same things, just the latter more used in english and the former more in german, I do not know. It would be good if we could get some facts. --snoyes 16:11 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

OK, the dictionary must be wrong - I just plugged both into google - and it seems "Neue Sachlichkeit" is almost always translated as "New objectivity". --snoyes 16:16 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)
Yes - I checked the Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art, and Norbert Lynton's essay on expressionism in "Concepts of Modern Art" (Thames and Hudson, 1974), and they both call it "New Objectivity". I'm pretty sure that's the more common name in English (I've never seen "New Functionalism" before). --Camembert
See also New Objectivity: "The New Objectivity, or neue Sachlichkeit (new matter-of-factness)". Hyacinth 03:11, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Max Nordau

I'm sort of surprised this article says it is ironic Max Nordau originally cointed the term degenerate art. Firstly, I consider this to be false. Much of Nietzsche's writings deal with decadent art. Replacing the word decadent with degenerate is hardly creative. Thus, I would highly suspect this entire discuss of Nordau is nothing but a myth, along the lines of other propaganda like the making of soap and lampshades from dead Jews. Further, the connection between German Nationalism and Zionism is well known and documented. It isn't really surprising at all that anything related to Zionism is similar to National Socialism. They are two sides of the same coin.

Wether or not it is "Ironic" should be left to the reader to decide, otherwise this represents inserting an opinion which is bias. Also, the punctuation needs attention. I see my efforts have been reverted en masse without consideration. I would suggest this "prophecy" quote is merely a "quote" or "statement" -- a "prophecy" implies supernaturalism. Please review WP:NPOV and take some time to check yourself for bias before reverting. Thanks and good luck. Zosodada
Agreed - ironic is POV. Your efforts weren't reverted without consideration, but they were reverted "en masse." It's that too much was deleted that you thought was POV which was in fact, fact. So....that's why the revert. However, I will begin the process of clean-up re: POV and be more careful with word usage in the future, something I couldn't agree with more. I think I e-mailed you on that point. Will clarify the necessary fact-finding as you suggested. Please bear in mind - I edit on paper and not on screen. It will take a day or two...but in progress. Thanks once again for your help!. Best regards, --allie 16:51, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Nix on the whole obit. Nix on Nordau's Austrian Jewish background. You are right. It is a "leader" and it doesn't matter whether it reads: statement or chilling forecast, or if I delete Ironic regarding the fact that Nordau was a Jew. i am tempted to leave that deleted as it now stands. It leads the reader into an assumption and auto eyebrow lift on POV regarding Nordau's theory.
  • Nordau hated modern art. He used a Lombroso's scientific theory of born criminal to prove his point. The Nazis then used Nordau's pseudo-scientific theory of born degeneracy to prove their point. Keep it clean, logical, and let the reader in; instead of "leading" the reader. That'll take a week for one paragraph, and thank you very much. --allie 00:03, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
If you reread the article, it is indeed ironic that Nordau coined the term "degenerate art." He wrote the book: Degeneration, and based it upon the Italian criminologist, Lombardo's theory. There is a very big difference in that assumption: Nordau's theory was that modern artists suffered from a scientific brain disorder, which he called: degeneration. So Nordau did not merely replace the word decadent with degenerate.
Secondly, Nordau and Nietzsche were not theorizing on the same level. Nietzsche was a philosopher; Nordau was a non-fiction writer and a critic who based his theory on a criminologist. He attempted to explain his dislike of modernism in scientific terms; Nietzsche did so in philosophical terms. THAT is a very big difference. Why? Because National Socialists were looking for a scientific rationale to defend their hypothesis of racial purity. Nietzsche couldn't do that - while their concepts may have been similar, there can be little argument that Nordau's was a far easier concept to base their rationale upon. If there were, then the National Socialists would have incorporated it into their own argument as well.
One of the most influential art critics in Nazi Germany was Paul Schulze-Naumberg. He wrote three books: Art and Race, The Face of the German House, and The German Art. Schulze-Naumberg used Nordau's theory to argue that artists unwittingly produce their own racial stereotypes. To prove this point, he used Nordau's own methodology - by showing examples of modern art next to photographs with people with deformities and diseases. The other most influential art critic,Alfred Rosenberg, also used Nordau's theory of Degeneration in his book, Myth of the Twentieth Century. In all of my extensive research, I could not find one National Socialist art critic who based his theory of racial purity in art on Nietzsche's philosophy.
There was a reason why the exhibit was called Degenerate Art and not Decadent Art.
As for your statement that Zionism and National Socialism are two sides of the same coin, that is your opinion. MY opinion is that the art of the WPA in America and the art of National Socialism were also two sides of the same coin. They were identical in motif (excluding the nudity); in terms of the propagandistic goals of heroism and pastoral emphasis (think Grant Wood) and the movement was known in America as "Social Realism." These American painters of the same era were as sick of the European "isms" as the National Socialists at the very same time.
OPINION and CONJECTURE are POV - a big no-no. It makes for a very interesting discussion on the talk page. The title of the article is: entarte Kunst. It is not our place to inject anything else - "neue Sachlichkeit"; Nietzsche; Zionism; Social Realism; even lampshades - are all irrelevant.
Except to us. :) Best regards, --allie 02:02, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)<-s->
Uh huh. Well, this is not so easy to do...deleted from article. What I can do, is a statistical comparison of ATTENDANCE RECORDS to Tuthankamen at the Met in NYC (best seller in 20th c) and same for Louvre. Will that work for evidence? --allie 23:49, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The first three rooms were grouped thematically, by the demeaning of religion, Jewish artists in particular, and how modern artists attempted to portray the alleged depravity of women. The rest of the exhibit had no particular theme.

Okay, your feminist streak is showing here. I don't see you adding "allegedly" demeaning religion? Yes: The creation of a work of art is a deliberate action. I do not think that artists were deliberately engaging in the act of of portraying women as depraved. But: I am not a National Socialist. "Allegedly" is POV. Unless you can prove or cite the "allegation" don't use it. In this case, there is no allegation to cite: It was official party doctrine.

Hi, I just looked over the Nordau bit. It's a long time since I perused Mad Max's tome, so I can't recall whether he claims that all artists in modern conditions suffer from mental degeneracy, or just the avant-garde ones. If it's the latter - which I think is the case - I wonder whether the term "avant-garde" might be better than "modern" artists, since the latter might be construed to mean ALL artists who live in modern cultures. --Paul B 18:04, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)


nordau was just a stupid jew, but you can't deny those artists are really fucked up in the head!

[edit] Entartete Kunst in Munich

I read somewhere that there were actually two exhibitions, one of the degenerated arts and one of the "good arts". By the way, the "degenerated" exhibition was by far more popular than the other one. Perhaps there is something on the German page indicating that interesting fact... --Keimzelle 13:03, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton as examples of Social realism?

I think this bit of the article needs work. I don't believe you could actually call them Social realists. I think the proper term would be "regionalist".

[edit] Rewrite

The opening section seemed inadequate as it barely defined the term, quickly changing the subject to Heroic Art, and did not mention that the term is also the title of a historically important exhibition. The only material entirely removed from the article is the line about Benton & Wood. As it stood it was pretty harsh on THB and GW, a careless reader could think they were being equated with Nazis. I also tried to clarify that Nordau embellished a theory of degeneracy that had been floating around since Darwin by grafting it to art criticism -- it was overstatement to describe him as conceiving the theory of degeneracy (see Stephanie Barron p.26) although he gave it a new twist. Ewulp 04:29, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

It seems like a good portion of the middle of the article needs help as well. I'm not that familiar with the topic, it would be great if someone who has a background in the subject matter could perhaps brief us on how we could re-write it.--Son of More 06:03, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you that the paucity of citations is a problem--although the article is factually pretty accurate it could be more detailed, and the "Degeneracy" section needs tightening. I made a start on this in June but there's still work to be done, and I welcome your input--this page doesn't see much action. The best way to start is to check the books listed as references (or others that are authoritative, for instance college textbooks) & add add citations, corrections and expansion as needed. Citing sources retroactively of course requires care to insure that the passage cited really matches what's in the article. I'll also try to give this article some attention in the next few weeks. Ewulp 07:13, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Slogans on walls

The article states: (quote) "There were slogans painted on the walls:

  • Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule
  • Revelation of the Jewish racial soul
  • An insult to German womanhood
  • The ideal - cretin and whore
  • Even museum bigwigs called this the 'art of the German people'" (end quote)


The original source cited for these five quotes gives many more. In whole, they are:

  • Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule
  • Revelation of the Jewish racial soul
  • The cultural Bolsheviks' order of Battle
  • An insult to German womanhood
  • The ideal--cretin and whore
  • Deliberate sabotage of national defense
  • German farmers--a Yiddish view
  • The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself - in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of a degenerate art
  • Madness becomes method
  • Crazy at any price
  • Nature as seen by sick minds
  • Even museum bigwigs called this the "art of the German people"

I believe that including this complete list, though it is on the long side, would improve the article. Ninjakiyoko 17 Mar 2007

I think you're right, although it is a long list so I trimmed a couple items that seemed redundant & dropped the remainder in. Ewulp 04:16, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Although I understand your intention in paring the list down, I'm not sure I can justify making a subjective decision about which to include and which not to. It seems that the list should be complete, or at the least note that it is incomplete. Does anyone else have input on this? Ninjakiyoko 19 Mar 2007
If I read your argument correctly, you believe that the list you have placed here has a quality of completeness about it; that abridgement of this list creates an important loss of authoritativeness, misleads the reader or falsifies the historical record, and that the article needs to be more explicit in pointing out that the slogans are presented as examples chosen from among many. I think this is wrong three different ways:
  • Your list, sourced to Stephanie Barron's book, is not complete. Photographs reveal that the walls of the Entartete Kunst exhibition were covered with many additional defamatory slogans and labels. Barron lists 12 examples, making the same kind of subjective decision that I've made here. In front of me is an article concerning this exhibit—it's from Arts Magazine, June 1988, by Jacqueline Guigui—in which she discusses the wall inscriptions and quotes three examples: "Take Dada seriously! It's worth it!" (sarcastic use of a quote from George Grosz), "Such masters still teach our German youth!", and the one about nature viewed by sick minds, which is included in your list and in our Wikipedia article. Three examples suffice in this case.
  • There's not much enlightenment to be gained by collecting the complete set; the article would be dominated by a long and dully repetitive list of inane insults. Ten is already quite a load. "Crazy at any price" seems expendable to me because the next paragraph explains:

    Next to many paintings were labels indicating how much money a museum spent to acquire the artwork. In the case of paintings acquired during the post-war Weimar hyperinflation of the early 1920s, when a loaf of bread cost trillions[citation needed] of German marks, the prices of the paintings were of course greatly exaggerated. The exhibit was designed to promote the idea that modernism was a conspiracy...

    This also makes it clear that these ten quotes were not the only text on the walls. Leading to point three...
  • Most readers will understand that what they see here are examples, not an all-inclusive record. Articles of this size aren't expected to be exhaustive in every detail. Ewulp 03:07, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I was unaware that the list is still incomplete. There could also be some confusion among the various sources' authors over what exactly is referred to, because there were several types of propaganda on the walls, much or all of which could be construed as "slogans." Although I think it would be interesting to include as much specific information as possible, perhaps as a list at the end rather than in the body of the article, the other list (of artists) is arguably more useful because it links to other Wiki pages. I still think it appropriate to add the words "for example," which resolves this entirely, and simply.

A note: Surprisingly, the English Wikipedia page on this exhibit is more extensive than the German one. Good work everybody. Ninjakiyoko 05:27, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

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