Would you buy a painting painted by a mass murderer? Would you enjoy the music knowing it was composed by a monster? Sometimes you can untangle good art from the bad people who create it mosquito?
These are the questions Channel 4 hopes to provoke next week when it airs the Jimmy Carr Destroying Art debate.
The show will buy a painting painted by Adolf Hitler and let studio viewers decide whether or not to burn the controversial comedian with a flamethrower.
Not surprisingly, the plan has been criticized as a tasteless gimmick. The Holocaust His Memorial Day Trust said the show “makes Hitler the subject of lighthearted entertainment”.
The Trust’s chief executive officer, Olivia Marks-Waldman, declared that the program was “just a stunt for shock value, not an excuse to trivialize the horrors of Nazism.” I have. But while Hitler’s paintings make the headlines, he is just one of the “problematic” artists to be discussed.
Others include convicted pedophile Rolf Harris and Pablo Picasso, who beats his wife for a womanizer.
Show will buy paintings painted by Adolf Hitler and let studio viewers decide if controversial comedian should be burned with flamethrower
Each painting by these artists has an opportunity for its defenders to participate in the program and for someone to discuss why the work of art should not be exhibited, whatever the reason may be. determines the fate of the photograph.
If the audience insists that a painting of Hitler should be destroyed, this is done during the broadcast. If it is saved by an audience, the fate of Hitler’s creation seems less certain.
Channel 4’s chief content officer, Ian Katz, just says he’s not going to hang it in the television company’s boardroom.
So hang Hitler on the wall? Vote to destroy it? Or do you choose a middle ground? Keep it and hide it?
Hitler was a much better painter than when I entered art school at 18.
His small paintings, mostly architecture, are worthless without knowing the artist’s name. It is because of Hitler’s notoriety that people collect them, and why are there thousands of fakes for every genuine Hitler watercolor.
In London during World War II, there was a very talented artist named Oskar Kokoschka, a refugee from the continent.
He was haunted by a strange sense of guilt. In the early 1900s he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but he turned down another applicant. . . Adolf Hitler!
Kokoschka confided his terrible sense of doom to his friends in a Hampstead pub. Had Hitler taken the place in his place, he would have realized his life ambitions. It was to become an opera scene painter.The world would never have heard of him. Perhaps none of the twentieth-century nightmares of war, Jewish persecution, and genocide would have happened.
Would you buy a Hitler watercolor? No, I think it’s certainly bad taste to do so. But if someone gave it to me, I probably would have taken it as a curiosity. Almost certainly not.
While Hitler’s paintings make the headlines, he is just one of the “problematic” artists to be discussed.Others include convicted pedophile Rolf Harris and Pablo Picasso who beats his wife for womanizing
But here comes another more tricky problem. It’s a matter of really bad people who were really good artists and whether you can like their art. Picasso was a brutal misogynist who told his mistress, Françoise Giraud, that “women are machines for suffering.”He said, “For me there are only two kinds of women: the goddess and the girlfriend of the doormat.” said.
He was physically and emotionally abusive towards women, and his granddaughter Marina wrote that he “subdued, tamed, enchanted, ingested, and crushed them to canvas” in animal sexuality. He spent many nights extracting the essences and then disposed of them when they were dry.
Two of his lovers committed suicide and two others went insane. Of course, he was no more of a monster than Hitler. But in the post-#MeToo era, he would have been cornered.
Yet his art is extraordinary. Not everyone loves it. As it happens, I think so — I think of him as one of the great giants of the 20th century, always experimenting, always finding something new, and from a purely technical point of view, he Considered to be a very prodigious draftsman and painter from his early days.
His views and work have always been something of a hero to liberals because he supported the Left in the 1930s when Hitler came to power. The reason is that he despises people.
Caravaggio is one of the leading painters of the High Renaissance. He died in 1610, probably of a fever when he was 38, although some say he was murdered. He certainly committed murder.
He was sullen, violent, sexually lustful, and a complete bad hat. but very extraordinary.
Consider the painting of his disciples recognizing the resurrected Christ at the Supper at Emmaus. Or his painting “The Calling of St. Matthew”, a painting of Jesus calling Matthew to be a tax collector. Seeing these pictures drawn by the killer changed human life for the better.
Every time I walk down London’s Regent Street and stare at the statue of Ariel that graces the BBC building, I renew my great admiration for the sculptor Eric Gill, who also appears on Channel 4’s debate. This charming man was a fine craftsman and a devout Catholic convert who produced some of the most beautiful images of the mid-twentieth century.
His small paintings, mostly architecture, are worthless without knowing the artist’s name.It’s because of Hitler’s notoriety that people collect them and why are there thousands of fakes for every real Hitler watercolor
Long after his death, biographer Fiona McCarthy revealed that Gil had sexually abused his family, sometimes even the poor family dog.
Many Catholics have come to feel that Gill’s Station of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral should be removed. You know what they mean – especially given their church and its priests’ horrible record of child abuse.
But this is a fascinating drawback, and Eric Gill’s statues, sculptures, and drawings remain beautiful in their own right.
Of course, great artists have an even more troubling problem. it’s money Even buying a Hitler watercolor is worth the price of a luxury family vacation.
A Picasso or Caravaggio canvas is far beyond the means of a non-millionaire. For this reason alone, I doubt collectors or public galleries would throw Picasso’s work in the trash.
However, Channel 4 should consider the question of whether it should. As to whether our benality works and invalidates our sense of morality.
Then there’s that question that afflicts some opera fans. Shouldn’t it be disgusting?
My answers to all these questions: the amateur endeavors of Hitler and Rolf Harris, the genius of Picasso, the towering music of Wagner, the sensationally lit oils of Caravaggio, the awe-inspiring beauty of Eric Gill’s statues. are actually the same. That is, we must continue to enjoy great art by unscrupulous villains.
Hitler’s art is not great. It remains on the market only because of its value as a nasty souvenir, as if it were part of Freak’s show.
It was his television fame that prompted the Royal Collection to commission a portrait of the Queen, rather than Rolfe Harris’ artistic talent. I think this embarrassing fill is quietly kept—he would never have been taken seriously as a painter. I could easily confine all his work to the lumber room.
By contrast, Picasso, Caravaggio, Eric Gill, Wagner – their brilliance transcends and overcomes their heinous sins.
I totally understand why some people disagree with me. In Israel, Wagner’s music was banned for many years. Who could forget that the overture to his great work “The Mastersinger of Nuremberg” was performed as Muzak in the concentration camp “Shower”?
But while Wagner was an anti-Semite and loved by Hitler, he wasn’t actually a murderer. And his work doesn’t just last, it lifts his soul.
A victim of Eric Gill’s lust had to endure the horrific consequences of his depraved actions. It doesn’t stop us from seeing the statue of Prospero and Ariel as art lifts the image of humanity into a realm where we all want to be better human beings.
Here, too, there is a deeper point that is often overlooked. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “You can’t carve anything perfectly straight out of a piece of wood that is curved like the material that makes up man.” In other words, all humans are imperfect.
Some people are guilty of really bad behavior. But in reality, art comes out of humanity. It’s complicated and sometimes made by bad people.
Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon were two of Britain’s greatest artists of the 20th century, and monsters. I scream if I think either one is having an affair with my significant other.
But the important thing they left behind, and why their name remains with us, is their fine art.
Beauty and truth bubble from the evil cauldron of the human soul. There is something amazingly uplifting about this fact.
Jimmy Carr Destroys Art airs this Tuesday at 9:15pm on Channel 4.