Ever heard of Dada or Duchamp? The early 20th century was a ripe time for the pranksters of the artworld. A ripe time for all of art, really, but the idea that judgement in art was fundamentally disconnected from any real assessment of aesthetic value (whatever the fuck that might be, but I can’t think of a better way to explain it right now) became a subject that some artists wanted to deal with. This kind of meta-content was a new thing and took many many decades to filter up to the larger culture. Nevertheless, a disenchanted group of artists took on the pomposity and emptiness of elite culture in many different ways, including parody of high art and outright condemnation of business as usual for artists. They had watched their brothers and fathers slaughtered to protect the positions of useless aristocrats.
A century later, retrenchment and further distance between high and low has caused great insecurity among art “professionals.” A drift toward complacent acceptance of the position of artists as the play things of the wealthy has brought along with it a systematic re-examination of the 20th century’s dramatic upheavals in culture and the inevitable distortion of the efforts of those early dissidents of art to make them seem like out of touch elitists themselves. The great artists of the 20th and 19th century who carved out an honest way for artist to express themselves and remain true to the real value of art have been redefined as puppets of extreme politics and unwitting collaborators with evil empires, including the USA. None of this analysis is particularly deep or probing, largely finger-pointing and nose-holding. A tactic that works just fine among the not so rigorous thinkers and opinion makers of art.
Your insistence that this idea that Futurists were collaborators with Fascists is established historical fact just tells me you haven’t examined why these stories are told in the first place and you haven’t allowed that your own teachers might be mis-guided academics with an axe to grind. Anything presented as “established historical fact” should be examined with a high power intellectual microscope. That phrase sounds a lot like a slightly more confident version of “received wisdom.” That is also a red flag for serious students of what really happened. Which is ALWAYS more nuanced and more complicated than any retelling can communicate. Even when that retelling does not have ulterior motives.
I watched an interview with Frank Zappa last night and was once again amazed by the depth of his understanding of the power of culture and how dictatorships, he characterized the current US government as a variety of “candy coated” dictatorship, consistently work to undermine culture because they correctly see it as a threat to their continued existence.
I honestly have never examined this story of the Futurists collaboration with Fascism up close, because I am just not that interested in the work of the Futurists, but I have always suspected this version of the story to be revisionist at least, if not down right invented. Maybe a particular artist is mis-represented as being characteristic of them when in fact he was tolerated until things got ugly and by then it was too late. Maybe a manifesto that was a jokey lark of a parody was used against them by their detractors and it stuck. Or it might be that those clowns really were not all that sophisticated and did fall for fascism at the beginning. To say that they knew how things would work out and went ahead anyway might be the least likely explanation.
