aesthetic and moral perceptions should be improved, has been tried out by
both the Communists and the Nazis, as well as the modernists. All of them
have had “The New Kingdom” as a goal, but the sovereign winner has
become Modernism. All over the globe, we find the same art—the same
installations and the same décor—whether it be in the Muroroa Islands,
New York or Hong Kong. (OK, 21)Nerdrum’s claim that modernism succeeded in conquering the world
where communism and fascism failed may seem outrageous, especially
when it is as bluntly stated as it is in the epigraph to On Kitsch:
“Immanuel Kant is to art, what Karl Marx is to communism.” But
Nerdrum is not the only person to see a parallel between modernist art
and totalitarian movements, and he does have a point in linking the
two.^38 He is taking the modernity of modernism very seriously, and
reveals how thoroughly it has embraced the modern project, most obvi-
ously in its famous slogan: “Make It New.” As a revolutionary artistic
movement, modernism rejects the past in just the way that radical polit-
ical movements on both the left and the right did throughout the twen-
tieth century. The artistic revolutionary bears the same relation to
tradition that the political revolutionary does. In both art and politics,
the revolutionary views tradition as the enemy—the way things were
done in the past is assumed to be wrong simply because it is the way
things were done in the past, and the past is regarded as standing in the
way of a glorious future. One of the early modernist movements in art
in the twentieth century was appropriately called Futurism, and its love
affair with modern technology—especially with speed and power—is a
good measure of how eagerly the modernists embraced modernity. And,
as is well-known, Italian Futurism had affinities with and links to
Italian fascism.^39
As artists, the modernists saw themselves as making a fresh start,
and their attraction to blank canvases reflected their longing for a clean
slate in life. Not wishing to be in any way bound or indebted to the false
ways of the past, the modernists craved to be free to build the world
anew from the ground up (often literally in the case of modernist archi-
tecture). In that respect, the modernists had the same goal as totalitarian
politics—which is totalitarian precisely because it rejects all traditional
ways of organizing society and seeks to create a totally new society on
ideological principles of the right or the left. In very practical terms,
Nerdrum sees the totalitarian impulse of modernism operating in the
fact that it tries to suppress all dissent from modernist aesthetic dogma
and will not tolerate any artistic alternatives:26 Paul A. Cantor