A striking line from German-American historian Walter Laqueur on early 20th-century transformation of the arts:
“The painters were fascinated by ugliness; the composers threw harmony overboard, gradually moving towards dissonance; the poets and playwrights were preoccupied with the madness of great cities, parenticide and rats emerging from rotting corpses.”
(Laqueur, Walter. Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918-1933. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974. P. 113)
Why? Why the widespread rejection of beauty, harmony, sanity, benevolence, and health?
Related: “Why Art became Ugly” (2003) — my explanation of how two lines of development of modern art culminated in postmodernism. The 29 images from Munch, Picasso, Dali, Warhol, Saville, and others used to illustrate the trendlines now have updated links. The article has also been translated into German, Spanish, Korean, and Portuguese.
Why? Inflation/ money depreciation. Messing with the primary means of human communication (money) causes massively ugly distortions that reward immoral actions. This ugliness is then reflected back by artists who see the horror and the buyers of art who identify with the mess. Then there are those “going long ugly” which is probably not a bad bet.
What causes people to allow messing with the primary means of human communication? People’s acceptance that wealth redistribution is moral. What causes that? Ignorance? Altruism? Fear? Skepticism? All of which lay the foundation for the accurate claim that the group making the redistribution decisions are supremacists(which they are by virtue of the fact they think they are supreme enough to redistribute other people’s life work) Tough spot we’re in. Maybe a tactic is to associate wealth redistribution with supremacy.