Following the talk I did last week, I am continuing to work on a piece that delves more deeply into aesthetics, kitsch and morality. I was struck by the following this morning:
From V&As notes on the Nazi’s record of ‘degenerate art’: “they denounced works of art which were interpreted as an attack against the German people and as symptoms of a cultural decline inextricably associated with liberal democracy“. (Sounds familiar…)
From Changing the Memory of Suffering: An Organizational Aesthetics of the Dark Side: “The abject is that which is displaced through a social process of ‘othering’ (Stokes & Gabriel, 2010; Cohen et al., 2006). Othering is a part of the organization of the collective instruction of memory insofar as it denies voice to that which is abject: … The rejected Other is safely kept in its displaced position although, being abject, it can never be fully banished or shed completely”.
When I was seeing a psychotherapist years ago, I was eventually asked to consider allowing the hateful cringey me (the ‘me’ that most of us try to ignore/hide/ignore/deny) a voice. And I think about how people are focused on AI images (many of which are horrible to look at, it’s true). And the moral tone used by people dismissing them, which is very easy to do given their relationship to Capital. And how they too are seen as ‘degenerate’ but also prime examples of propaganda – either intrinsically or in a clear and obvious way.
At the end of last week’s talk, I was asked where the ‘alien’ is (I had mentioned how an emergent framework based on waves rather than dichotomies felt alien); and I answered, that it is us. Similar to the cringey ‘me’. And perhaps those images are the traces and sounds of the alien that we are. But we’re not terribly happy with or accepting of the thing we’ve become … work continues!
Continuation of notes on Kitsch
Literature/bibliography for ongoing work in the shape of a mind map
Refs:
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/entartete-kunst-the-nazis-inventory-of-degenerate-art