Hitler and the Tyranny of the Aesthetic

Abstract

On the occasion of William Jefferson Clinton's inauguration as the 42nd President of the United States, Arthur C. Danto, the art critic for The Nation, made a special plea to the new President on behalf of art in America. 1 Why not, he asked Mr. Clinton, be the Arts President? Nothing could be better at a time of aligning yourself with the national spirit, Danto advised the President, than to declare the same allegiance to the aesthetic world. Danto argued that the recent Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art revealed the special connection between the democratic aspirations of America and of the Republic of Art. Throngs of people flocked to see the exhibit, despite the fact that their own presence made viewing the paintings impossible. It would have been valuable for the President to have attended the show, Danto explained, to appreciate what his fellow citizens felt it worth enduring just to put themselves in the presence of great beauty--an experience all the more unfathomable and rewarding given the contradictory fact that these same people may not have been able to understand the meaning of Matisse's works.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.