Battle for Art - David Elliot
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• Notion that an artist’s individual conscience or sensibility can lead to personal or universal redemption is in direct opposition to corporate view of culture, violently repudiated by Hitler and Stalin.
• Immanuel Kant – Critiques – subjective but altruistic - - symbolically and intuitively Absolute – universal moral consciousness – Art purely an end in itself
• Rousseau – “The sciences, letters and arts /// wind garlands of flowers around the iron chains that bind [the people] and stifle in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they seemed to have been born – makes them love their slavery and turn them into what are called civilized people”
• Under despotism – art had reflected and reinforced the immoral power of the state – Rousseau search for freedom and quality demanded a moral sense should pervade all aspects of culture – autonomy in the arts represented a field of non-specific , secular, symbolic and intransigent morality.
• Dictators saw themselves as successors to revolution – not despots but the people gilding the chains – noble savage lost his autonomy and his integrity
• Germnay USSR and Italy – increasingly intense battles for control of art and culture – integral part of establishment of power
• Cultural revolutions – way of getting rid of enemies at home.
• Cultural revolutions took place during which all autonomous modernism was eliminated to be replaced by compliant officialdom.
• End of WW2 – Europe characterized by a terrible vacuum where once stood people, language and art.
• Federal Republic – merits of abstraction over realism – rejigging controversy between individual freedom and collective democracy – GDP
• Darmstadt Dialogues of 1950 – Willi Baumeister defends abstract art from attack by realists blamed modern art for “loss in the center” of culture
• USSR – Zhadonov, Malenkov increasingly constricted concept of art – autonomous art slow to come back to life.
• Point at which art becomes a weapon is point when it loses its power – when power tries to enlist art for its own purposes, it runs the risk of curtailing other basic freedoms.
• Free society – art is a reflection of its complexity and an intimation of its capacity for change – often incompatible or critical relationship with the culture in which it is made 0 politics of totalitarianism or been consensus – democracy elevated at expense of freedom
• Art should be valued not only for itself but also as a sign and guarantor of other freedoms “pecks the hand that solicitously tries to feed it”

Other Notes in this Category

1. Aspects of Art and Power in the third Reich
2. Battle for Art - David Elliot
3. Hobsbawn
4. The end of the avant garde - painting and sculpture - David Elliot

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