in a world of public funding, art must be “politically correct,” however
that term may be defined in a given state at a given time. In order to win
and maintain government funding, the artist must ultimately tell the gov-
ernment what it wants to hear, or at least not tell it what it does not want
to hear.
Nerdrum is struck by the way art in the modern world is judged, not
by its craftsmanship, but by its political message. In a truly shocking
passage, he dares to call into question the greatness of a painting gener-
ally regarded as the supreme masterpiece of modern art:Public art has moral, religious, ethical or just purely aesthetic obligations.
We see this when we compare Picasso’s Guernicawith Goya’s Third of
May. Guernicarepresents all of humanity’s suffering, it is a painting for the
UN. Goya’s painting, on the other hand, shows the individual victim’s suf-
fering. Guernicais an abstract symbol, whilst Third of Maysubjectively
confirms and transcends. (OK, 30)I was stunned when I first read this passage. In terms of my art educa-
tion, I was brought up in the heyday of modernist ideology and taught to
worship the Guernica. I remember being taken as a child to see it by my
older brother, as if on a pilgrimage, when it was still at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, and I have dutifully returned to it as an adult
to view it at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. I still think that it is a
great painting, and I disagree with what Nerdrum says in this passage.
But perhaps he does have a valid point. Much of the praise of the
Guernicahas nothing to do with its qualities as a painting and every-
thing to do with the historical circumstances in which it was created and
the political message it conveys. And commentators do abstract an anti-
war message from the painting, insisting that it does not apply only to
the Spanish Civil War but teaches us about the horrors of war itself. I am
fascinated by Nerdrum’s characterization of the Guernicaas “a painting
for the UN”—I can just picture it hanging on a wall of the General
Assembly. That is undoubtedly a false and unfair characterization of the
painting itself, but it does say something about the way the Guernicahas
been received by the art establishment and why it has been set upon so
high a pedestal in the pantheon of modern art. I myself would charac-
terize the Guernicaas a great painting that happens to convey an anti-
war message. The problem is that in today’s art world a painting will be
celebrated solely because it expresses an anti-war message, even though
it may be incompetently executed and in fact lacking in all distinction as
a work of art. That is the issue Nerdrum focuses on in what he regards16 Paul A. Cantor