The original meme is straight up Nazi propaganda. The Nazis and fascists in general are big on enforcing a correct view of what good art is. Anytime there is someone who has a very negative view of modern art beyond simply not caring for it, it's a red flag. Those sort of people are either vulnerable to fascism or are already fascists.
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It's also bullshit, we still have "realistic" art, but we let people express themselves however they want nowadays. Whether that is by painting the beauty of human life or trying to capture feelings in geometric shapes is up to the artist. That's a good thing. We don't need to put down art we don't vibe with, and nobody is forcing people to enjoy or relate to "modern" art.
(Also I just want to shake every person who says "tHiS Is nOt ArT" about some piece they don't like because oh my god art is whatever you want it to be and doesn't follow some set of rules)
I think there has to be some basic rules to art, it cant literally be anything and everything, otherwise it's nothing. Like it has to involve inspiration in some way.
Work is not art.
I think there actually is some merit in debating what is art, but we can start by clarifying anything where someone created something with the intent of expressing themselves is definitively art.
Jacob Geller's "Who's afraid of modern art" video talks about this subject more if anyone wants to dive deeper into it.
Those sort of people are either vulnerable to fascism or are already fascists.
A friend I would have 0% hesitation calling a communist haaaates modern art with a passion. stop overgeneralizing. RETVRN type stuff in general? yeah, low key fascist.
This meme noticeably ignores Socialist Realism which continued to be popular post ww2, socialist cultural influences didn't really fall out of popularity until the cold war shit fully took hold.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't actually buy that Marxism is some sort of antithesis to fascism. They're very much opposing forces in theory, but then again so is liberalism.
Fascism is not fundamentally about being illiberal or anti-communist, but it always is. It is about hijacking a system to enforce an ultimate hierarchy of might make right. Words, ideologies, principles of political philosophy are all meaningless tools to accomplish the fascists true goals. They only want power at the expense of others to the maximum extent. They want to enforce through violence a world where they reign over the infidels, the poor, the weak, the other They'll eventually exterminate those at the bottom, sometimes quickly, but definitely eventually.
Communist states are probably harder to hijack than liberal ones as they require slightly different tactics, but it can happen anywhere. So long as the good ideals and principles that supposedly represent a nation are abandoned, any state can become fascist.
What this ultimately means for your friend is that either they are at risk of co-signing some terrible shit, or they don't actually hate modern art as much as you think they do. It might be that they are more vocal about their dislike, but still respect that people find value in it.
In Europe, the Dada (1916) and Surrealist (1920) movements began as a response to WWI. The atrocities committed during the war devastated humanity to the point where artists couldn't (or wouldn't) depict the human form, let alone realism.
Source: Art History nerd 🤓 The thing your post is trying to disparage, haha.
Would you recommend any good podcasts on dadaism/art history in general? Looking for a kind of In Our Time/Revolutions kind of vibe where there's less humour (but not necessarily humourless) and where it's relatively planned out/scripted.
Shows that the creator had no clue about the art world at that time. Kandinsky created his most famous works before WW2 as well. Considering the Nazis curated the Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937 this whole meme has a very doubtful aftertaste.
I think the point of abstract work is less in the execution and more in the idea. Dadaism, for instance, draws uniquely on the horrors of the first world war and frustrations with the senseless loss of life. An AI producing the same piece of work would ring hollow, I think.
Bro, what is this? The Nazis banned everything that was even close to expressive in Germany calling it degenerate. I don't even now if they allowed impressionist art tbh. So art as in the bottom of your picture did exist before WW2. Heck, Expressionism started before WW1.
Two things in special are, in my opinion, the reason for the change in style. First, the invention of photography, that freed painters from the responsibility of capturing reality. The second, the advanced on chemical processes that made color paint cheap and affordable and let painters experiment with colors that were limited to only the elite artists before.