OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR: Form Follows Fascism

NY Times ^ | January 31, 2005 | MARK STEVENS

[Pharmboy]

Hmmm...another gay nazi. Interesting that this was not mentioned in the AP obit posted yesterday.

[Pharmboy]

The previous thread

[Cicero]

BTT for later.

[BenLurkin]

A sad story.

Just as sad is that there are 'Americans' today who idealize Fidel Castro -- and they are not being properly chastised.

[Tailback]

Was this guy a friend of Joe Kennedy's?

[ModelBreaker]

To his credit, he renounced his fascist beliefs, unlike the communists from the same era (Whitaker Chambers is the exception).

[Pharmboy]

Good question...he likely knew him and Lindbergh also.

[SlowBoat407]

People who live in Glass Houses....

[untenured]

Mr. Johnson's observation was refreshingly hard-nosed about art's relation to politics: good politics is not now and never will be a prerequisite for good art.

If the politics are bad enough, no one should care about the art.

[Callahan]

I wonder if the NYT bothered to note Sontag's soft spot for Stalin in her obit.

[Pharmboy]

True, but he sure took it real serious and spent a lot of time with them. And I detest Lillian Hellman also...(perhaps more, actually).

[Pharmboy]

LOL!

[Clemenza]

"Don't be stupid, be a smahty. Come and join the Nazi Pahty."

[Clemenza]

Actually, the one good thing you can say about Albert Speer (and others in the Nazi Party) is that he certainly had an eye for Art Deco. Ironic, as the the largest concentrations of Art Deco in the USA were historically inhabited by Jews (Grand Councourse in the Bronx and Miami Beach).

Philip Johnson was a fine architect, although he had some personal "issues."

[Pharmboy]

Hey...they also had great uniforms.

[NY.SS-Bar9]

"...nonagenarian enfant terrible..."

A little full of ourselves, aren't we?

[jordan8]

The New York Times has been lying about racial violence for the last 50 years. There were probably far more racist murders of whites in New York City than there were of blacks throughout the South during that period, and a reasonable person cannot help but to conclude that the dishonest way the Times treated that violence was a major contributing factor to its existence. They have consistently and consciously covered up victimization of whites. The have not just flirted with racist mass-murder, mass-rape, and other crimes, they have been up to their elbows in them for decades.

[Snickersnee]

"Paging Mr. Howard Roark -- Mr. Roark, please pick up the white phone...."

[GSlob]

If the politics are bad enough, no one should care about the art.
Wrong. Great art (not that easy to come by) endures far longer than politics. Who besides the historians even remembers Renaissance politics (which was bloody enough)? But Sistine chapel frescoes are remembered and celebrated, and there is no end in sight for that remembrance. Richard Wagner was an anti-semite - and a composer of genius. His music endures, and is going to continue enduring, no matter what. The threshold for such durability is very high, though.

[untenured]

What do you suppose Leni Riefnstahl's contribution was to the strength of Hitler's regime? If she had a significant contribution, in that Hitler's rule was notably strengthened (idle speculation, to be sure), does she not count as evil regardless of the quality of her films, and would not the world be better off had the films never been made? An artist's contribution to evil is of far more interest to me than his artistic output.

I don't get very excited about frescoes. Massive piles of corpses disturb me, though. Works of art are inconsequential next to mass homicide. Art lasts for centuries, and totalitarianism's victims have no names, which is, I think, why people have the sort of reaction you do. But the world will remember the totality of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century for every bit as long as they will remember the artistic output of the Renaissance, and the glee with which some artists facilitated the former is far more important than their artistic production. Those absolutist politics are what I had in mind, and thus your Michelangelo analogy is IMHO misplaced.

The enthusiasm of intellectuals of all types, including artists, for mass-produced wickedness is every bit as important as the enthusiam of businessmen or politicians for same. I just can't get excited about the work of artists who labored to strengthen a Hitler, or a Stalin, or a Mao, or whatever, any more than I can get excited about German firms who ran slave-labor camps even while they were making a lot of high-quality products for very reasonable prices. If this description is accurate (and I didn't know much about him), Philip Johnson is of a piece with Paul De Man IMHO - perhaps a genius, but fatally tainted.