From the Nazi's degenerate art exhibitions to the present-day culture wars, the most annoying new art history accounts on the internet are drawing from a long tradition
Twitter is littered with accounts with profile pictures of Roman busts and names like 'The Trad Aesthete", which post pompous tweets about art and architecture. This isn't new, but the far-right's turn towards visual art is a more recent development. In the past few weeks, there has been a spate of tweets attacking such modernist upstarts as Picasso, Duchamp, and the Impressionists. While some of these accounts wear their white supremacy on their sleeves, others cloak this allegiance under more innocuous language and imagery. This is more pernicious, as it acts as a way of luring in reasonable people: just about everyone can enjoy a picture of a rustic Italian village, recognise that some contemporary architecture is tacky, and agree with anodyne statements such as "beauty is nice".
But many of these individuals are harbouring – and disseminating – extremely reactionary views, and while a few random Twitter accounts aren't influential in and of themselves, the far-right ideology they promote is resurgent across the world. Many commenters have been quick to point out the similarities between these present-day attacks on modern art and the aesthetic ideals of the Nazis, and it's undeniable that these parallels exist. But rather than being a deliberate throwback, it's important to understand this phenomenon as being rooted in our own historical context.
By comparing modern art with conventional depictions of rural scenes and able-bodied white people, this digital subculture is expressing a specific hierarchy of values. It's about returning to a lost halcyon age of (implicitly white) western civilisation, which is sometimes Ancient Greece, sometimes the Renaissance, and sometimes Mad Men. It expresses a desire to return to "the natural order of things", which has been degraded by modernity and multiculturalism, and conceptualises beauty as something which is eternal and objective.
