How to make a mass-murderer

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Definition of art is "whatever people call art" I think?

So, yeah, the only way to make your definition valid is to kill those who think otherwise. Ancient human way of proving someone wrong... And very on topic :3

I think OP is referencing "levitated mass", by Michael Heizer, which is occasionally featured in conservative youtube videos about how modern art is degenerate, and should depict beautiful things, drawn or painted realistically.
And I use the word degenerate here intentionally.

Dear OP - Art looks like this today precisely because the stuff and style in which Hitler painted is associated with Hitler (and Stalin. and Mao... Dictators seemed to like kitsch)

Pretty sure this has essentially been the definition since "Fountain" by Duchamp (pictured already in this thread).

I just Googled what it looks like. Even if the rock itself is not sculpted, its placement and the pathway beneath it involve design.



Reminds me of a speech called "The Incoherence of Atheism" by Ravi Zacharias. He criticized a modern art museum for having staircases that lead nowhere as a commentary on the pointlessness of existence (which he somehow conflated with atheism.) His rebuttal to this supposed meaning was to mention that the building had a foundation...which does nothing to refute the idea that going up those stairs was still pointless. (The foundation could represent natural laws or something...assuming Zacharias' interpretation was even what the architect was going for.) Earlier in the speech, Zacharias also came up with someone besides Hitler to blame for Hitler -- he blamed Nietzsche for writing "God is dead."



Is that really the reason that art style fell out of favor? Also, there are people who still enjoy kitsch and/or bland, pleasant paintings (I personally wouldn't call the Hitler painting example "kitsch.") In local art galleries where I live, what seems to be popular is bland photorealistic paintings of local hillsides with trees. And maybe a cow. I don't go for it, but apparently other people do.

Not sure if this was the causal trigger for his anti-semitism. Hitler had a Jewish friend when he was soldier in the Wehrmacht. What is likely is the combination of childhood stories about jews, the likely success of Jewish artists and the subsequent blame jews got for losing the war combined to fill his head with all the necessary ingredients to become the psychopath he would later become.

it's a bit exaggerated, but not wrong. Abstract expressionism (Jackson Pollock) was pushed by American propaganda and used as an example how American art was innovative - the Russians at that point had abandoned abstraction for Socialist Realism and Europe was too devastated/intellectuals had fled to the US.
then came postmodern art, the breakthrough of concept art an the establishment if new artfirms like performance. These were all hailed as a break from the old which, realist, conservative, and particularly in Germany if course, fascist art.
I mean... in the 60s, Viennese stydebts sqyatted in a lecture hall, reading leftist propaganda and defecating on the tables, mainly ro piss off rheir parents, who hadbeen Nazis - in the 60s, in Germany and Austria, everyone's parents had been Nazis. yet here they were, being Captains of industry, politicians etc.
There is an explicit rebelliousness in the deconstruction of realist art at that time.

these people then grew upand have since gotten the audience for fine art - and so, fine art developed further down that road.
But it's also seriously hard to go back - the technical mastery of 19th century french academic painting or sculpture is hard to surpass, but now there's also technical reproducibility -everyobe can buy prints for cheap - and abidy of theory deconstructing the creation of an art object like a painting.
So, realist art is associated with conservativism, rebellious art with the 60s, but art has become this cosmos that's all about new sensory experiences and ideas.

the giant rock isn't about the design at all - it also shouldn't be judged from pictures.
you have to stand under it and realize just how massive it is, and that mankind is moving mountains now just for fun.

That's very interesting. As an American born in the early 1980s, I knew Hitler was an artist and that Nazis hated so-called "degenerate" art and I knew that stuff like psychedelia was associated with the rebellion of the 60s, but I never directly associated traditional painting with Fascism.



I don't mean to judge it without seeing it in person. I just think that, even looking at photos, I already disagree with the OP's description:



It seems there was more thought put into it than that.

Here's a quote I found from LACMA director Michael Govan: “‘Levitated Mass’ is not referring to anything outside itself. When you walk beneath it, it’s entirely related to you. It’s not a symbol of anything. It’s about what the person is seeing and experiencing.”

As someone who is into "art for art's sake," I like that.

and racism, sexism, orientalism... you know: consrvativism (I mean... fascism is basically ultra-conservativist politics)- but it's also associated with anti-intellectualism.
Maoist art, or North Korean art, looks basically the same as Nazi art - except for local variation of beauty and colours etc.
it's always about a very direct depiction of what "the people" are supposed to find good and beautiful.
The soviets initially tried abstraction - a new art for a new people. But only intellectuals liked it, and when Stalin got into power, he was more interested in being a dictator than in creating new humans.
But those abstract Soviet paintings became an important stepping stone in the *western* art-canon.