Extract
[...] To attack Nazism, aesthetics itself must be attacked like the destruction of unauthorized arts or the aesthetic rhetoric of purity. The difference between fascist and communist aesthetics, although they share similarities, lies in the fact that the protagonist of communist aesthetics is not embodied by a leader, but by the masses, as the people even though this has not prevented the cult of personality around the figures of Lenin and Stalin, nor the replacement of the people by the Party. [...]
[...] Susan Sontag notes that it was particularly evident among the SS, implemented in a brutal manner because the SS was perceived as an elite military community, beautiful and violent. This politicization of art led not only to war, but also to eugenics and, in the case of Nazi Germany, to genocide, as Hitler's desired policies valued what he considered the aesthetics of the Aryan race. The Nazis' power stemmed not from distance or veneration, but from an imagined intimacy between rulers and people." The politicization of art is not always so direct, obvious, and brutal. It is not always in the service of authoritarian or totalitarian policy. [...]
[...] Some other philosophers and critical thinkers, like the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, make the distinction between the "aesthetics of politics" and the "politics of aesthetics." Although the two formulas are reversible, they are philosophically and ideologically opposed. According to Rancière, politics has always been aesthetic, creating subjectivities to make it perfect and flawless. and aesthetics is political not by accident, but by essence. In "Between Past and Future," the philosopher Hannah Arendt draws an analogy between aesthetics and politics, an analogy that serves to emphasize that, in both spheres of activity, it is the human capacity for judgment that is at work. [...]
[...] Is there a difference between the aestheticization of politics and the politicisation of art? Questions: The term camp refers to a style, a form of expression based on extravagance, provocation, irony and grotesqueness, in pose or behaviour. Kitsch is the accumulation or heterogeneous use, in a cultural product, of features considered trivial, old-fashioned or popular. Both terms refer to exaggeration, artificiality, a certain naivety and an opposition to normative and conformist behaviour, and reclaim what has been forgotten, but camp subjects it to irony, putting aesthetics before morality and giving a frivolous character to what is serious, whereas kitsch, which is more often used in place of the word camp, often designates artistic bad taste or an outmoded or offbeat object. [...]
[...] By losing its aura, the exhibition value replaces the 'cult value' of the art work. It becomes a cultural asset offered for aesthetic contemplation and mass consumption, a more or less profane and vulgar form of worship given to the great testimonies of human creativity. For Baudelaire, the dandy has a particular relationship to the question of being and appearing, as well as to modernity. He is a person who possesses an independence of mind and who is dilettante. For Baudelaire, it is the 'last act of heroism', a search for distinction and nobility. [...]
