[BRIEF NOTE] Kitsch and Totalitarianism

[rfmcdonald]

Via Foreign Dispatches, I've been directed to Andrew Mueller's article in The Guardian examining Peter York's Dictators' Homes and the broader question of the root causes for dictatorial kitsch.

When money is no object, and power is unhindered by such pettifogging obstacles as planning regulations, why are the results so ghastly? Ceausescu commissioned Bucharest's People's Palace, a 1,000-room presidential residence occupying more ground than any other building on Earth but the Pentagon. It is monstrous in more than one sense of the word: homes, schools and hospitals were demolished to make room for it, Romania's anaemic economy was bled to build it, and the result, still visible as enduring evidence of what one man's lunacy can wreak, presented what York perfectly describes as "a staggeringly totalitarian frump of an exterior."

Mueller goes on to note the long list of dictators fond of astonishing crmies against good taste,--Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Turkmenbashi, Milosevic, Mobutu, even Hitler and Stalin--and wonders why nothing stopped them. The skepticism of their certainly was a non-factor.

"Again," says York, "we look at these things with a 21st-century ironic eye. Post-modern ironic eyes didn't exist in these societies. In their position, you would have to do all that. No other symbolism would be understood. In countries which often don't have a free press, or much of an educated middle class, it has to be cartoonish."

Abiola Lapite goes on to argue, refreshingly, that the sorts of men who strive for absolute power just aren't going to accept limits placed upon their taste, that theirs is the sort of personality prone to indulgence. They know what they want:

[I]t isn't that absolute power corrupts even one's aesthetic sensibilities, but that it is those with crude sensibilities who tend to go all out for power in the first place, not sophisticated aesthetes: it ought to come as no surprise that it was the peasant-turned Imperial Regent named Toyotomi Hideyoshi who gloried in gaudy tea ceremonies even while the born samurai Sen no Rikyu was perfecting his more restrained style, nor that the former man eventually had the latter end his life for this difference in tastes. To expect men who bully, cheat and slaughter their way from the very bottom of society to its apex to entertain delicate artistic notions is to expect the impossible - for such individuals,
the showier a thing is, the better it must be, and, pace Mies, more will always be more as far as they're concerned.