No texto, Michaud discorre sobre o pensamento do alemão Joseph Beuys, o qual é perpassado por conceitos românticos de mito, rito e pela crença inabalável na arte como instrumento de Liberdade, de regeneração da autoconsciência, dos valores espirituais e de reestruturação social. Pontua a indignação do artista diante do estado de crise da civilização européia, no pós-guerra, e da perda da unidade e da hegemonia cultural alemã, com a instauração do nazismo. Por meio do engajamento político, do poder das ideias e de ações estritamente conectadas com a vida e com a história alemã e europeia, caberia aos artistas, conforme Beuys, se envolverem na reconstrução da pátria mítica, livre de conflitos sociais e ideológicos.
On the eve of the national-socialist rise to power, the German right was deeply divided over the issue of technology. In 1931, Oswald Spengler's Man and Technics took the cultural pessimism of his famed Decline of the West yet a step further, heralding the "fatal end" to which "Faustian technics" were inexorably leading. One year later, Ernst Jünger, in The Worker, expounded a "techno-fascism" affirming, on the contrary, his faith in the imminence of a new salvatory order : "The global Domination of the Iconic Figure of the Worker." National-socialism was about to attempt a synthesis of these two faces of Prometheus.
How the history of art begins with the myth of the barbarian invasion—the romantic fragmentation of classical eternity.
The history of art, argues Éric Michaud, begins with the romantic myth of the barbarian invasions. Viewed from the nineteenth century, the Germanic-led invasions of the Roman Empire in the fifth century became the gateway to modernity, seen not as a catastrophe but as a release from a period of stagnation, renewing Roman culture with fresh, northern blood—and with new art that was anti-Roman and anticlassical. Artifacts of art from then on would be considered as the natural product of “races” and “peoples” rather than the creation of individuals. The myth of the barbarian invasions achieved the fragmentation of classical eternity.
This narrative, Michaud explains, inseparable from the formation of nation states and the rise of nationalism in Europe, was based on the dual premise of the homogeneity and continuity of peoples. Local and historical particularities became weapons aimed at classicism's universalism. The history of art linked its objects with racial groups—denouncing or praising certain qualities as “Latin” or “Germanic.” Thus the predominance of linear elements was thought to betray a southern origin, and the “painterly” a Germanic or northern source. Even today, Michaud points out, it is said that art best embodies the genius of peoples. In the globalized contemporary art market, the ethnic provenance of works—categorized, for example, as “African American,” “Latino,” or “Native American”—creates added value. The market displays the same competition among “races” that was present at the foundation of art history as a discipline.
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