Art Power Boris Groys

The creations of a heroic race can be observed and admired in the monuments produced by the bodies that belong to that race. The ultimate artwork, however, is the viewer whom the heroic politics makes into a member of the heroic race. The true art of politics is, for Hitler, the art of the continuous production of heroic bodies

racial breeding that were supposed to produce a heroic race remained pure theory in the end

Hitler by no means understood an artwork to be a passive depiction of the hero. For him, and in this respect he is a child of modernity, the artist is a hero. The act of artistic creation is in itself an active, heroic act, no matter whether it is the creation of an artwork or the creation of a State.

And in the competition among losers that modern culture has offered us, Hitler was exceptionally, if inadvertently, successful.

According to the standard offi cial defi nition, Socialist Realist artwork must be “realistic in form and Socialist in content.”

Hitler anticipated ultimate aesthetic recognition. This archaeological perception of his own present linked Hitler with a sensibility widely held in his day. The question of how their own present would eventually be seen in the historical perspective moved many writers and artists of modernity.

Hitler did not believe that humanity was composed entirely of a single race, since there were substantial factual differences in the judgments of taste made by different people. Consequently, he presumed that humanity was composed of different races, and thus people have different tastes because they belong to different races.

These images are the icons of the contemporary political theology that dominates our collective imagination. These images draw their power, their persuasiveness from a very effective form of moral blackmail.

The heroic act transforms the hero’s body from a medium into a message.

Hitler should be seen as a product of radical modernity, because he no longer believed that culture could be “spiritually” handed down across time.
Since the death of God, in Hitler’s view, the spirit of culture, the spirit of tradition, and hence any possible cultural meaning or signifi cance had become fi nite and mortal. The eternity of which Hitler spoke is thus not a spiritual eternity but a material one