Post by tory on Nov 10, 2021 13:25:53 GMT
Andrew Graham-Dixon, the eminent art historian, has been blacklisted by Cambridge University due to the fact that he "produced a Nazi salute" during a discussion about taste, the transcript of which is below.
Andrew Graham-Dixon: Thank you. So, I’m going to be talking about taste in a deeper sense. Let’s get one thing straight at the beginning. We’re all human beings; we all evolved a long time ago; we know about our earliest beginnings as a civilisation in caves. What did we do in caves? Seventy thousand years ago, we started doing three things at the same time. We started speaking, we started making music and we started making images. So we express ourselves through visual things, through musical things, and through speaking things. Tonight, we are talking about taste, which to me is how we express ourselves through visual things.
Taste is the expression of ourselves by how we make, or arrange, visual things. It could be clothes – that’s the trivial bit, the handbag, the trainers, and I’m not interested in that. I’m talking about what we express when we arrange visual things. Is there such a thing as a good way of doing that, or a bad way of doing that? To me, the question is really this: is there such a thing as a good way of being a human being, or a bad way of being a human being? If you don’t think there is, then we may as well all give up. Taste is ethics, taste is how you are, taste is what you believe. So if you don’t believe there’s such a thing as a good taste, you don’t believe there’s such a thing as being a good you.
To me the best way of expressing this – because it’s the most obvious way, the easiest way of making you understand – is to ask whether there is such a thing as bad taste. Is there such a thing as really bad taste? I mean: bad taste that makes you want to throw up. Because if there is, then there must be good taste, right?
So let me tell you my great example of bad taste to explain why good taste exists and why it matters, really matters. Adolf Hitler. [Audience laughter] It’s actually not funny, but I’ll allow you to find it funny, briefly.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: what is it about? It’s about taste, the whole book is about taste, culture struggle through taste. [Begins caricature of Hitler] “My struggle – Adolf Hitler’s struggle – I was a watercolour painter, I was rejected, my German art, my purity, it was rejected, the romantic tradition of German art was rejected by this modern art, this modern horrible art that was promoted by the Jews, which was Cubist, inspired by the art of the Negro, tribal art – yeurgh, how horrible is that. We must expunge this from our Deutschland, we are the pure Aryan people, our genetics must be pure, our art must be pure, our taste must be pure…”
[Back to normal voice] So what did Hitler do? In 1937, the most popular exhibition of modern art ever held was staged in Austria and Germany and seen by three million people. It was called Entartete Kunst, “Degenerate Art”. Hitler, and Goering and his other friends, removed from every German museum every single work of art that was Cubist or abstract or Surrealist; Hitler hated Surrealism, the art of dreams and nightmares, designed – he thought – to make simple Germans go mad. And if you’re mad in Hitler’s Germany, you go to the camp.
He took all that modern art and hung it on the wall – hung a lot of it upside down. This was an exhibition: it was Taste, Hitler’s idea of Good Taste. And then he also staged another exhibition called The Great German Exhibition in which artists like Arno Breker exhibited their huge sculptures of German stormtroopers, heroic men ready to make war, to kill and exterminate and expunge and eliminate.
So you had a taste-choice. [Hitler caricature] “You go for the blonde Aryan, which is your destiny, your single pure culture – or you choose the art of the Jew and the negro!”
[Back to normal voice] And when Hitler had finished doing those exhibitions, he made a cultural programme of extermination. The works of art in Entartete Kunst were destroyed, they were burned. And what happened next? All of the groups that the art represented – the mentally ill, the homosexuals, the blacks, the Jews – were actually killed.
So it began with art, it began with taste, and it ended with death: for real people, millions of real people. That is why there is such a thing as f---ing bad taste. And if there’s bad taste, then there has to be something else, and I can’t say what it is, but it’s for us to invent. And if you don’t believe in it, you don’t believe in humanity. That is why there is such a thing as good taste.
I will end with one small, personal point. I bought a house in Scotland two years ago, from which I drove here today, and among the things left behind were two little wooden figurines, which were made in the 1930s, either in England or Scotland, and which show that racism, and all of those things like anti-Semitism which were intrinsic to Nazi bad taste were also prevalent here at that time. They were figurines of black men, draped in tailcoats like servants, holding candles, and they had monkey tails.
Two days ago I burned them. And I would say that in burning them I performed an act of good taste. Thank you.
Taste is the expression of ourselves by how we make, or arrange, visual things. It could be clothes – that’s the trivial bit, the handbag, the trainers, and I’m not interested in that. I’m talking about what we express when we arrange visual things. Is there such a thing as a good way of doing that, or a bad way of doing that? To me, the question is really this: is there such a thing as a good way of being a human being, or a bad way of being a human being? If you don’t think there is, then we may as well all give up. Taste is ethics, taste is how you are, taste is what you believe. So if you don’t believe there’s such a thing as a good taste, you don’t believe there’s such a thing as being a good you.
To me the best way of expressing this – because it’s the most obvious way, the easiest way of making you understand – is to ask whether there is such a thing as bad taste. Is there such a thing as really bad taste? I mean: bad taste that makes you want to throw up. Because if there is, then there must be good taste, right?
So let me tell you my great example of bad taste to explain why good taste exists and why it matters, really matters. Adolf Hitler. [Audience laughter] It’s actually not funny, but I’ll allow you to find it funny, briefly.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: what is it about? It’s about taste, the whole book is about taste, culture struggle through taste. [Begins caricature of Hitler] “My struggle – Adolf Hitler’s struggle – I was a watercolour painter, I was rejected, my German art, my purity, it was rejected, the romantic tradition of German art was rejected by this modern art, this modern horrible art that was promoted by the Jews, which was Cubist, inspired by the art of the Negro, tribal art – yeurgh, how horrible is that. We must expunge this from our Deutschland, we are the pure Aryan people, our genetics must be pure, our art must be pure, our taste must be pure…”
[Back to normal voice] So what did Hitler do? In 1937, the most popular exhibition of modern art ever held was staged in Austria and Germany and seen by three million people. It was called Entartete Kunst, “Degenerate Art”. Hitler, and Goering and his other friends, removed from every German museum every single work of art that was Cubist or abstract or Surrealist; Hitler hated Surrealism, the art of dreams and nightmares, designed – he thought – to make simple Germans go mad. And if you’re mad in Hitler’s Germany, you go to the camp.
He took all that modern art and hung it on the wall – hung a lot of it upside down. This was an exhibition: it was Taste, Hitler’s idea of Good Taste. And then he also staged another exhibition called The Great German Exhibition in which artists like Arno Breker exhibited their huge sculptures of German stormtroopers, heroic men ready to make war, to kill and exterminate and expunge and eliminate.
So you had a taste-choice. [Hitler caricature] “You go for the blonde Aryan, which is your destiny, your single pure culture – or you choose the art of the Jew and the negro!”
[Back to normal voice] And when Hitler had finished doing those exhibitions, he made a cultural programme of extermination. The works of art in Entartete Kunst were destroyed, they were burned. And what happened next? All of the groups that the art represented – the mentally ill, the homosexuals, the blacks, the Jews – were actually killed.
So it began with art, it began with taste, and it ended with death: for real people, millions of real people. That is why there is such a thing as f---ing bad taste. And if there’s bad taste, then there has to be something else, and I can’t say what it is, but it’s for us to invent. And if you don’t believe in it, you don’t believe in humanity. That is why there is such a thing as good taste.
I will end with one small, personal point. I bought a house in Scotland two years ago, from which I drove here today, and among the things left behind were two little wooden figurines, which were made in the 1930s, either in England or Scotland, and which show that racism, and all of those things like anti-Semitism which were intrinsic to Nazi bad taste were also prevalent here at that time. They were figurines of black men, draped in tailcoats like servants, holding candles, and they had monkey tails.
Two days ago I burned them. And I would say that in burning them I performed an act of good taste. Thank you.
