Hitler: Overrated?

So, enough theory. Hitler: Overrated or Underrated? ...
Anyway, I've been trying out this weird little argument lately. It goes like this: aren't we lucky that Hitler was such a terrible artist?

I don't mean, "what if Hitler were accepted into the Vienna academy?" It's likely we would be better off if Hitler, lousy artist or not, had been able to pursue painting. But what if, after being rejected, after becoming Fuhrer, we looked back at his paintings and were forced to recognize genius? This is a "Hitler as van Gogh" hypothesis. Many artists aren't really appreciated until after their death, after all.

Of course, the first time I suggested this, someone asked me how I knew he was such a bad artist... and I had no idea. I was simply going on assumption. Fortunately I was able to find the pages here and here. The gist of it is that Hitler, while having some talent, was basically a hack. He supported himself by painting postcards (by necessity, these are fairly derivative), and while his architectural features are rendered in loving detail, living figures tend to be disproportionate and haphazard.

Third, notice the perspectives. Architectural perspectives are rendered with extreme precision, with almost loving attention to detail; however, people and animals are out of proportion, poorly articulated, and vastly out of scale with the backgrounds. Figures are rendered with wanton disregard for anatomy or accurate animation. This is the primary reason he was rejected by the Vienna School of Fine Arts: "Test drawing unsatisfactory."

So we can reassure ourselves that Hitler was nothing terribly interesting on the art front. What if he had been? I'm not sure how we would handle it. Hitler, in contemporary language, occupies a unique role: he is a historical individual with no redeeming qualities, the nadir of moral expression. And he occurred after the bulk of our moral and historical framework was in place -- Nero and Attila the Hun are less singularly alarming for that reason. What would we do without him? Probably substitute Stalin -- Stalin doesn't have a lot going for him, though he was smarter than Hitler. World War II would have gone quite differently, save for a number of monumentally poor strategic decisions by Hitler.

But switching to Stalin only reframes the question. We seem to need someone to think of as unequivocally bad. In contemporary debate, it's often easy to tar all Democrats or all Republicans, or Obama or Bush* with this brush. Mature positions, in my experience, have fewer and fewer individuals painted as pure black (but plenty of dark gray, certainly), but we can all, seemingly, agree on Hitler. So, in an extremely limited way, we're lucky that there's no particular reason to say "That Hitler guy? not as bad as he seems."

And yet, too many people are out there defending Hitler on wholly irrational grounds. Not many, thankfully, but still too many.

*Seemingly inept and authoritarian, but still no Hitler.

Subjectivity

I am always wracked by sentimentality, in large part because I demand to live in a context rich with emotional meaning. I invest everything around me with a narrative, or a place in a larger narrative, until everything is more or less humming with crucial purpose. You may be wondering, what does this have to do with Red Faction?

This piece on Penny Arcade touches on a number of things I've been going on about lately (or will be going on about shortly), mainly a certain kind of subjectivity in art. Video games are especially apt in this way, since the actions of the player change the content of the game in a much more recognizable way than, for example, how one approaches a painting.

Also, Tycho is an excellent writer, so touches on these things much more gracefully than I would. This, as my brother once said to me, is the problem of being a philosopher rather than a poet -- that a poet can say things more elegantly, more quickly than a philosopher can. On the other hand, as a philosopher one can explain things at greater depth. I have, I think, more ability with poetry, but in any case I find it difficult to be both at once.

Also, I will say Casey has more grace with philosophy than I do, and his blog is well worth reading.