How Fascist Ideology Thinks About Art

You may have seen that tweet from some Twitter Guy about objectivity in art a while back. If you haven't, he said:

The most annoying people in the world love to say there is no objective difference between good art and bad art

So I made a list of 15

Good Art v/s Bad Art: The Masterlist of 15 Differences👇

For fun and giggles, I went to this guy's Twitter so you don't have to (it's as weird as you might think—a lot of stuff about Machiavelli and Napoleon). Here's the whole image:

Look at how utterly incoherent these criteria are. "Directional changes: Sets off an upward spiral/Sets off a downward spiral." "Values: Hints at forgotten values/Mocks the concept of values." "Good GPS, Bad GPS: A good map/A malevolently bad map." This is vibes-based, an irony when compared to the claim that this is an "objective difference" between good and bad art.

I want to look at the rhetorical and ideological moves employed here. I don't know if this guy is a fascist, so I'm not saying that; I only want to look at how this particular tweet fits in to the broader context of fascist ideology and rhetoric (whether that's intentional or not, I don't really care enough about the guy to figure out).

I'm not an expert on art history or theory; it would be silly of me to try to explain these subjects and some of the major problems with fascist ideas about art when other people have already done such a better job of it than I could. If you haven't seen them, here are a couple of great videos on the topics of what counts as good art:

Our intrepid tweetster gives the game away when he says "Instinct Knows". This is a foundational core of how fascist ideology works. You are not supposed to think, only react. These ideas about art relate to Umberto Eco's characteristics 2–5 (bold mine, italics original):

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ("When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," "universities are a nest of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

In this guy's conception of art, you're supposed to react to art on an instinctual level. "Good" and "bad" art is defined as "art that makes you feel comfortable" and "art that makes you feel uncomfortable"—that is, good art is familiar, easy to understand, visually stable, aesthetically orthodox, and so on. Discomfort or confusion, which is often the point of a piece of art, is re-framed as an instinctual recognition of "objectively bad" art.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

Also consider Laurence W. Britt's 11th characteristic of fascism:

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

A lot of art is a commentary of other art, or an intentional subversion or disregard for "rules" of what art can or should be. Fascism requires total submission to the ruling hegemony, so any form of criticism or opposition is a dangerous skill for people to have.

While we can see how the above characteristics relate to this attitude about art, rhetorically here's another move hidden in all this. From Umberto Eco again:

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

Did you catch it? "The most annoying people in the world love to say [that] there is no objective difference between good art and bad art." And yet, nothing in this "Masterlist of 15 Differences" is, actually, objective. Every single category is subjective, the very choices of category are subjective, and the "good" and "bad" definitions of the categories are not only subjective in the sense of what definitions he went with, but also subjective in their interpretation (what counts, for example, as art that "boosts" vs. "saps" energy from the viewer? I'll bet that it depends a lot on the viewer, don't you think?).

None of the categories even deal with, you know, properties of art, such as composition, contrast, color, form, depictions, etc., which may be the only objective things that you can say about art. The closest might be "essential nature" because "good" art (apparently) is "structured and rhythmic" while "bad" art is "unstructured and obsessively anti-rhythm", so there's a case that what he's (poorly) trying to describe is composition of a piece, but even here there's a subjective attitude: what counts, objectively, as being "obsessively anti-rhythm"? Do you have to know the artist's personal obsessions of intent, or is it a property of the work regardless of the artist's intent?

These are the wrong questions to ask, of course, because the whole point is that THIS IS ABOUT VIBES. You're not supposed to understand them; the vagueness and incoherence of the claims serve to make it hard to rebut them. You get lost in the weeds trying to layout a complex argument, while your interlocutor can just make claims based on intuition and unexamined bias that feel true. By claiming that these subjective, and indeed, explicitly instinctual, reactions to art are objective, objectivity is redefined as instinctual reaction.

Asserting that instinctual reactions to art are actually objective serves to limit our (if we accept these premises) ability to critically and complexly reason about art. In this form of argument, "objectivity" functions as a get-out-of-jail-for-free card, only in this case "jail" is "defending your positions". "This is bad because I don't like it" can be contested; "this is objectively bad" can't be because objectivity, in this view, can't be contested.

To understand the entirety of this "masterlist" of differences between "good" and "bad" art, just look at difference 8: "Instinct Knows: Instinctively recognized as art/Instinctively recognized as a scam". That's his thesis; everything else is post-hoc justification.