Democracy and Artistic Freedom: Why does art scare “strongmen”?

“Art knows no national boundaries, genius can speak in any tongue and the entire world will hear and listen.” - President John F. Kennedy, November 1962 at a Fundraiser for what would be later named the Kennedy Center for the Arts

Donald Trump’s immediate and urgent need to bring the art community to heel is a departure from his first-term approach when he spent a lot of time tweeting out his disdain for the actors and artists who spoke out against him and his policies. It was a strange thing for a president to spend his time on. In retrospect, it was relatively harmless. Even in its messiness, Trump’s social barking at and about artists seemed to imply an understanding on some level that dissent was allowed, albeit not welcome. In the days leading up to his second term, he announced on his alt-right social platform, that he was appointing Jon Voigt, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson as his “Hollywood ambassadors.” Loyal Trumpers all, they were delighted to be of service. The three men, Trump said, would be “his eyes and ears”, in the work to bring Hollywood “back.” A few weeks later, he announced himself as the next Chair of the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. He followed up with a few unprecedented actions: purging its board of people “who did not share” his vision for a “golden age of art” and replacing it with loyalists. These loyalists then duly voted Donald Trump to be its next Chairman.

Photograph by Kevin Sabiuts / Getty

Artistic freedom is often taken for granted because it is so ingrained. Amid all the crackdowns and purging in Washington, D.C.—and just two days before Trump made his Kennedy Center announcement Pulitzer prize-winning rap artist Kendrick Lamar performed at the Super Bowl. His 13-minute halftime show was a brilliant, layered, and artistic example of how art can inspire, agitate, and mobilize. Right from the start, Lamar’s all-Black dance crew, dressed in red, white, and blue, formed the shape of an American flag, raising their fists, then bending down, backs facing the sky. The message was unmistakable: America was built on the backs of African American slaves. From there you had allusions to code-switching when Samuel L. Jackson’s Uncle Sam popped in reminding Lamar to “play the game”—and not be “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.” Serena showed up to c-walk, something she got heat for doing at Wimbledon a few years back. It was an all-Black show celebrating Black life, Black love, and Black Power. Google searches for “Forty Acres and Mule,” a phrase dropped by Lamar before jumping into his most popular song, spiked the week after the performance. Record tune-in, record streams…There is no denying that the performance captured the zeitgeist. For the first time since mid-January, a huge portion of the population was focused, for a few days at least, on something other than Donald Trump. That is art. Truly free art—and artists—have no obligation to comfort, explain, or even be all-inclusive. Art that you or I don’t like or understand is still art. From Michaelangelo’s defiant David to post-Franco-Prussian war impressionist paintings, from Picasso’s Guernica to Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, artists, when acting freely, are always fighting established ideas about what art is and its role in society. Great art is a progressive force that moves us forward. Once a work of art is done and released to the world, artists accept that they no longer have control over its reception, perception, or meaning. At its core, the artistic process is freedom. This is why art and dictators or “strongmen”—who crave absolute control—are forever at odds.

Entartete Kunst: Degenerate Art

A crowd gathers around the ‘degenerate art” of Otto Dix.. Photograph by Christian Borchert, September 1933. © SLUB / Deutsche Fotothek

In the fall of 1936, Hitler instructed his government to begin a “purification” of art, including purging close to 20,000 works of modern art from German museums and firing museum directors. Hitler deemed Modern Art, which included post-war movements like expressionism, surrealism, and Dada, ‘degenerate’ and its creators infected, mentally ill, and dangerous. In 1937, a national exhibit was staged in Munich, in a newly built Greek temple-inspired building named the Haus der Deutschen Kuns (House of German Art). The building was to showcase the type of German art that Hitler deemed appropriate and truly German. Art that celebrated racial purity, German manliness, and other “blood and soil” ideals. The show had two parts. In the Haus der Deutschen Kuns, “clean and healthy” German art was displayed. Across the way, in older buildings, the “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) would be shown as an example and cautionary tale.

Hitler accused museums that collected and displayed modern art, of wasting “vast” sums of taxpayer dollars to purchase “worthless” art.

On the opening day of the exhibit, Hitler, surrounded by high-ranking officers of the Reich, was introduced as a “master builder” by Goebbels and the “greatest of living artists” by his Interior Minister. Neither is remotely true. In a rambling 90-minute speech to a crowd of 30,000, Hitler railed against art that "cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist…," and described artists as “half-wits who on principle see blue fields, a green clouds..(who) paint in this manner because they see things that way…(and) should be dealt with in the department of the Ministry of the Interior, where we sterilize the insane...” Modern art, he declared was a "conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks.” Among other things, Hitler accused museums that collected and displayed modern art, of wasting “vast” sums of taxpayer dollars to purchase “worthless” art. To be an artist in the Third Reich you had to be “Aryan,” register with the government, and adhere to party-approved aesthetics.

Woke Art

Hitler attacked modern art as non-sensical, disordered, and unfinished. By the time World War I ended, 18 million people worldwide had been killed. Artists, processing a world that condoned and prolonged extreme brutality, began to look inward for artistic inspiration. They rejected old-world edicts and state-backed academies that governed artistic subject matter. By focusing on the interior state of man and his fate in an industrial world, artists began to create art that was less objective and more driven by emotion. This interiority revolted many people who wanted to be comforted by art instead of confronted with abstractions and profundities. Hitler in particular viewed it as a threat to his hold on German hearts and minds. Art that encouraged introspection also encouraged free thinking. Hitler’s idea of art left no room for interpretation: it was conservative, evoked traditional values, and celebrated manliness, family, and race. Most of all, its hyper-realism left little to the imagination. It was the first powerful step in “othering” the unwanted elements of society.

Writer and critic, Alfred Werner wrote that “(w)hile the Nazis did want their people to see the “Degenerate Art,” they must have been alarmed upon noticing that three times as many people flocked to see it as came to see…” the Hitler-approved art. This could have been because of people’s instinct to see things they are told not to look at, but Werner, a German refugee who escaped Dachau, thought many, including a German artist friend of his, “came to say good-by (sic) to pictures they had grown fond of…”(1) The full list of confiscated “degenerate” art included works by Marc Chagall, Edvaard Munch, Otto Dix, and Elfried Hohse-Wächtler. (2)

Even with everything else going on, Trump’s focus on controlling—and erasing— artistic narratives is concerning. Since the Kennedy Center announcement, Trump has signed an executive order that limits who the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) can award grant money to, excluding “any applicants with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEA) programming. It is alarming that Trump’s first-term cluelessness seems quaint, a mere 5 years later. The saving grace then was his and his administration’s ineptitude. Infrastructure week anyone? Of course, one very real thing he did accomplish (with major assists from Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell) was appointing three Supreme Court Justices who would tip the balance of the court, and go on to overturn Roe vs. Wade, among many other awful and gravely consequential things. His goal this time is to exhaust, if not paralyze, the opposition, and it seems to be working. The takeover of the government by Trumpist ideologues is so all-encompassing, that it is hard to know where to focus. Much of what he tried to accomplish during his first term was stymied by the bureaucracy. This time, he is dismantling the bureaucracy at an alarming pace. He began his first term on the back of his heels, this time, he is frighteningly efficient and has, so far, little opposition.

1 Werner, Alfred. “Hitler’s Kampf against Modern Art: A Retrospect.” The Antioch Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 1966, pp. 56–67. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4610739. Accessed 20 Feb. 2025.

2 Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler was a German avante-garde painter. After she had a nervous breakdown in 1932, she was hospitalized, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and forcibly sterilized. She was later gassed in a sanatorium.

Alfred Werner Obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/16/archives/alfred-werner-critic-and-author.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yU4.WjDZ.SAFBJXA_TQN8&smid=url-share

Explore the “Entartete Kunst” art inventory on the Victoria and Albert Museum website here.