Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
mr tea: politically the modernists seemed to cover the spectrum: the Italian Futurists were fascists (in fact i would say they established the ideological foundations for Italian fascism), the Surrealists tended to be Marxists/Trotskyites, the Dadaists were cultural if not political anarchists, Mayachovsky and the Russians were Leninists. There doesn't seem to be a definitive modernist politics. If you saw the film Max (w John Cusack), it suggests that Nazism was kind of a radical modernist vision gone completely apeshit. I think there's actually something to that. Hitler as a theatrical performer. i don't know.
I'm by no means an expert on art history, but I read something someone on here linked to recently that said the Italian Futurists weren't really fascists, or even proto-fascists, but that aspects of their ideology were later incorporated into fascism. Perhaps a bit like how the Nazis co-opted Nietzsche (although with maybe less of an ideological leap involved, I dunno). Anyone got any good links about Futurism and fascism?
Re. Nazis and modernism - it's hard to say, I get the impression Nazism was very heterogeneous with respect to its relationship to modernism. At one level, it has in common with Marxism (or at least 'applied Marxism'/Leninism) the utopian notion that it was going to 'scientifically' bring about an ideal society; ideal for the right sort of people, anyway. But at the same time there was the 'volkish' aspect, harking back to a more-or-less fantastical ideal of an ancient Greater Germany, to say nothing of the obsession many Nazis had with the occult. Hitler himself was notably dismissive of the neo-paganism espoused by many of his own cabinet, on the basis that it had long ago been supplanted by Christianity and was therefore an 'evolutionary dead end' in cultural terms.
i should add, i would support any form of fascism - even the most egregious, murderous brand of fascism - controlled by the "intellegentsia," or whatever term you want to use.
Um, come again - am I missing something here? :slanted:
Last edited: