Memorial to Hitler's 'degenerate artists' is a monumental mistake
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Version 0 of 1. Monuments are fake memories, fossilised in dead stone and duplicitous bronze. They do not preserve the past in a helpful way, as archives and public records do, for historians to argue about. Instead, they turn it into a myth. "Collective memory" is conventionally held to be a good thing, bonding and deepening us, but in reality it is stupid and false. When Jimmy Savile died, he was "remembered" as a national treasure. When a different story started to emerge recently, one of the first reactions was the removal of his monument from a cemetery. The monument enshrined a myth. What is happening now in the case of Savile is, by contrast, a historical inquiry, as the world of 1970s celebrity is investigated. History is this act of questioning of the past, the opposite of monumentalism. This is why the idea now being touted of a monument to modern artists who were victimised by the Nazis is a bad way to tell the story of art, and a stupid sentimentalisation of the 20th century. A campaign has been launched in Britain to raise £30,000 to commemorate "degenerate artists" whose works were vilified, mocked and even destroyed in Hitler's Germany. Many artists fled continental Europe as a result. The great dadaist Kurt Schwitters came to Britain, and the idea of a monument to these artists is bound up with our belated national discovery that the marvellous Schwitters lived and died here. The "Degenerate Art" exhibition staged by the Nazis to mock modern art was a horrible moment in cultural history – agreed. But how can a monument help to understand this bizarre episode, or the modern art it vilified? Monuments teach nothing. They simply invite nostalgia and contrived empathy. Doesn't that seem a singularly inappropriate way to tell the story of modern art: the pity of the new? Modern art in the early 20th century was an attack on sentiment, a rejection of consensus. German dadaists like Schwitters created kaleidoscopic images of chaos and chance and intentionally provoked the right. Born out of the first world war, when patriotic lies had murdered a generation, Dada was the negation of the trite and the phoney. How can a mournful monument be a good way to pay homage to subversives like Schwitters? It cannot: it can only become a false memory that turns these elusive artists into glib caricatures. Modernist art was iconoclastic and irreverent, the opposite of the lugubrious pomp of monuments or memorials. In fact, the story of "degenerate art" is turned on its head by this clumsy gesture. The Nazis may have hated modern art, but they knew what they did like. They absolutely adored monuments. |