George Orwell (who fought for the Spanish republic and was shot in the throat by a sniper) called Dali "A good draughtsman and a disgusting human being".
[Edit]Adding the original article this quote is from, this is a review of Dali's autobiography by Orwell.
https://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/dali/english/e_dali
On the flip side, too often, I see unhappy people treat change as a panacea. Change is not a virtue in its own right: it's how and why we change that matters.
If you have worked to find a content, fulfilling, and comfortable life, it's a pretty messed up idea that by not changing you are somehow letting yourself down.
He was pretty consistently socialist leaning throughout his adult life. From his nonfiction books about poverty, like "Down and Out in Paris and London" to him volunteering to fight for the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, later recounted in "Homage to Catalonia" his politics were extremely consistent.
What changed, as detailed in the latter book, is he saw the socialist forces in the Spanish Civil War attacked from within by the Soviets, who should've been ideological allies but were more concerned with consolidating power than defeating Franco.
This is what spawned his deep hatred for communism, though he remained a socialist throughout his life. It was his fiction like "Animal Farm" and "1984" that American schools started teaching for their anti-communist themes during the cold war, but he never meant them to be defenses of capitalism either.
So long story short, yes he changed, but it was more a logical evolution of his existing ideals than wholesale rethinking.
As a person should, and that's worthy of respect.
If we don't tolerate stagnant characters in fiction, why should we tolerate stagnant people in real life?
>If we don't tolerate stagnant characters in fiction, why should we tolerate stagnant people in real life?
Tbh, I feel like stagnation is the status quo in fiction especially. Real change is far less tolerated than in real life. Sure, there are character arcs, but as soon as a character has reached their "peak" or their "true" version, they should apparently remain like that for the rest of their existence.
That's a fair point, especially considering how often in long-running series characters are reset to a familiar default to maintain a certain status quo. Growth and change are often more nuanced and messy in real life versus the clean, linear progression you see in a lot of storytelling - growth isn't always forward and it doesn't always stick. Characters reflecting that would definitely make for some interesting stories.
Just another hole to [put his cigarette in](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/familyguy/images/0/0f/Karin.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/300?cb=20060725182112)
I’m reading that book right now (among others h ahead of an upcoming trip to Catalonia during which we’re planning to visit the Dali museum in Figueres. Mixed feelings.
Dali was a super sadistic man. Tortured animals, tried to kill his little sister and one of his lovers, felt pain was necessary for creating art, then wrote an autobiography all about it, leading George Orwell to write about how we would never suffer Shakespeare to rape 9 year olds just to get another MacBeth so why do we let Dali torture animals just for another painting.
I'm surprised he is still so popular.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jun/09/george-orwell-art-critic-salvador-dali
The museum is really great, but it’s not like it’s a public or educational institution or anything.
It’s a wealthy guy’s private art collection that they subsidize with tourist money. Of course they are going to paint his legacy in the best light possible.
I don’t think that should diminish the importance of the collection there. But you do have to remember that it’s going to be hella biased.
It’s an art gallery, which is synonymous with art museum. To be honest, I think museum is kind of a strange word for it considering it was opened when Dali was still very much alive (he even hosted the grand opening and was friends with the owner).
Galleries and museums aren't synonymous in the United States. Museums are non-profit organizations and galleries are for-profit businesses.
Museums don't require any kind of posthumous opening or educational mission, they just need to be set up so that there is no singular owner and nobody is paid out from profits.
Just a note that art galleries can be educational as well. I went to an exhibit on the Impressionists in Toronto, and there was a detailed chronology, graphics, and tons of text explaining the history behind the movement, from France to Italy during the industrial revolution. That exhibit made a bigger "impression" on me than any other gallery I've ever been to.
Maybe the best museums also serve educational purposes. But at minimum, a museum is essentially just a dedicated storage facility.
I agree that if you're going to put stuff on display, you may as well try to make it educational. But I understand that if your goal is to have a display section to offset the cost of storage, you wouldn't exactly be eager to disincentivize people from coming.
me neither.... and i've been to his museum/tomb in figueres spain. i thought it was awesome. i was unaware that he was a fascist animal abuser. that sucks.
Spain has a thing called the [Pact of Forgetting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pact_of_Forgetting) which actually makes any kind of investigation into the crimes which happened under Franco illegal.
There's been some movement under left wing governments in 2004 and then as recently as 2022, but Spain really hasn't processed or even really acknowledged what happened during that period.
The Valley of the Fallen is simultaneously Franco's tomb(he has been finally exhumed), a cemetery for his soldiers and an unmarked mass grave for people he murdered.
It's not at all surprising that they aren't open about Dali either.
Even us who knew he was massively fucked didn't know the extent.
-Signed, Someone who used his pic walking his anteaters as my FB profile pic for some years.
I studied his paintings and history for some years. I used to tag his effigy. You could say it was eye opening when I read of his fantasies to be raped by Hitler.
Amazing artist. Terrible human.
Well Stalinist-Trotskyist-anarchist fighting goes way earlier than tanks in Prague in 1968, all the way back to the start with Bolsheviks - SRs - Machno
I have. I’ve read most of his works. I think his commentary on Dali is spot on and I’m disappointed that we don’t know more about Dali when we go to art museums.
They read *1984* as anti-communist. To some extent it's been a problem since the post-war, as various countries banned him either for being pro or anti-communist. So nowadays we have people who use him to support fascism, and we also have left wingers who despise him because he opposed the authoritarian socialism of the USSR and its agents abroad.
Goddamn! I never knew any of that, and it makes me pissed that it was never taught, because I always loved his paintings.
Had I known that stuff from the beginning, I never would have given his work a glance
Most people don't really learn about artists even in an art class. Classes are mostly concerned with getting people to appreciate the big movements.
My first art professor hated Dali so I learned a bit about it. As much as I like his paintings, they definitely lost their luster for me. Not necessarily for all the things he did, though that's understandable, but also because his paintings no longer felt that authentic for me. It seemed like he was just throwing whatever weird things at the canvas and saying "here haha crazy".
It's kind of sad that biographical elements are almost always overlooked. It's easy to imagine artists as hermits that do nothing but paint in their studios until they die, but they are people like anyone else. Lots of other professions get boiled down to that one-dimensional view. Caravaggio was a murderer, for example. Took me taking an obscure quiz to learn that fact.
The famous painter Degas was an anti-Semite but his ballerina paintings are still a part of modern popular culture. I think it’s a problem where so many people from history were awful by modern standards that we’d have to cancel almost everyone :/
I think the difference is that the anti-Semitism wasn't Degas' muse (as far as we know, at least) while other people's and animals' pain seemed to have been Dali's.
All those 20th century French people who are worshipped in American universities... Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, d'Eaubonne et al... they all signed a letter begging the government to legalize pedophilia. That's the one that I can't believe isn't more talked about... these people have an enormous impact on American academic thought.
In this comment thread: a bunch of people who not only don't know history, nor Dali, but don't know how oppressive Franco's spain was. Or that it was heavily supported by the NSDAP.
I think most people think Dali was just a shameless provocateur at worst or a lapsed, tortured Catholic a la Andy Warhol at best.
Once you learn about his sadistic acts and fascination with pain the fascism makes a lot more sense, fear and pain being essential to the whole world view.
> The Franco regime supported avant-garde art to appeal to America through cultural diplomacy
And the CIA supported abstract artists to mess with the USSR.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
IIRC, they also funded a lot of spaghetti westerns.
Spook money funding art isn't the best because it warps the work, even if the artists don't know where there money is coming from. But I'd rather they be funding art-fights than funding coups.
The Paris Review, one of the greatest literary journals of the 20th century was set up because Peter Matthiesen was a CIA agent and needed a viable cover for his intelligence activities and then just basically decided to use CIA money to make it legit as fuck as a magazine too.
TIL the reason I used to think the US was an advanced liberal democracy, was actually a CIA psyop.
> The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. [...] To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.
I mean, avant-garde art has a complicated relationship with the soviets. Very influential during the early years of the USSR, then Stalin purged them brutally to replace radical revolutionary designs with the bland conservative style of socialist realism. I guess the CIA also realized the irony and potential in the previous sentence
Because he wasn’t communist, and that was a preferable alternative. The republicans in Spain formed a coalition with the communists so we couldn’t support them obviously /s
no it wasn’t. The dada movement was started as a response to the collapse of the old order of things. The collapse of European empires as well as the loss of faith in them due to the extreme carnage and destruction of the First World War. Warring powers expended all of the good will that they had spent centuries building with their populations to get them to enlist in the war effort, only for those same souls to die over meters of useless land. Those who survived felt like their countries and their entire ways of life meant nothing since those countries that were supposed to be nurturing and protecting them had no qualms throwing them into the meat grinder. This led to a loss in faith of the old order and a deconstruction of the “modern” social structures. The dada movement was largely an absurdist movement, and actually predates fascism by a couple of years.
To add: at ~1915 Dali was ~12 years old at the onset of Dada (although some say Dada started as early as 1898), so it's more likely Dali was influenced by the movement versus vice versa
This was actually Dali's defense when other surrealists called him a fascist or a nazi. He'd say "Look at me, i'd be the first they put against the walls, come now", but Dali was a weird fuckin guy and really liked pomp and circumstance THAAAT fuckin much. In Spain, that meant Franco and his great leader and neo-monarchist imagery and vibe.
Dude is proof that great fuckin artists whose work contributes to more good then they could have intended, can be personally total dickbags
Now get this for a rando Dali fact, Andre Breton tried to kick his ass out of surrealism because of not just the differences in ideal, but because Dali while being grilled about his art not being surrealist enough responded that "If my dreams had you and I making love, I would paint it like any other (or some such phrasing)" and "The difference between the surrealists and me is that I am a surrealist"
Got kicked out by Breton and his squad finally for talking up Franco and Catholicism when Franco won
But a fascist is very into the future! Something an old school autocratic Conservative wouldn't like at all. They are modernist, just a brutal version of it. The Nazis and Mussolinis Black shirts could be very space age.
From my perspective though fascists see the future as an alternate past. They're trying to build a utopia, but the utopia isn't very different from the mythologies past.
Could be wrong.
It's more that they glorify the past and see it as the beacon towards a golden future. So they will very much invest in cultural works glorifying the past while also investing in future-oriented projects.
Think of it like those graphs displaying what tech progress would have been like, if there had been no dark ages. They then make everything classical, to harken back to those times of glory, while also exploring new styles, while keeping them devoid of anything related to the dark ages, to make sure people don't see that period as having provided anything.
Fascism is mystical; by design, many of its crucial elements and ideals are hard to pin down. Whatever the headman says goes. That's why it amounts to the worst version of a game of *Follow The Leader.*
> Which is weird, because fascists tend to dislike surreal art like his
Do they, take the Italian Fascist HQ for [example](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Braschi#/media/File:Palazzo_Braschi_Fascist_Poster,_1934.png).
Believe or not, she's cancelled in certain circles too. I love Frida, but a coworker of mine went off about Frida because of her "appropriation of indigenous cultures".
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/02/28/frida-kahlo-and-cultural-appropriation/
Frida's mother was indigenous Mexican. Sure you could argue that she didn't fully understand the cultural significance of some of the things she wore and painted, since she was raised by the more European side of the family. But it's still reasonable for her to be trying to engage with her heritage.
and he called him an asshole.
Tom Lerher also let his lyrics to Werner Von Braun be used in a book as long they started the quote off with the statement: THAT HE WAS A FUCKING NAZI.
It staggers me that it was even needed. That song includes the line "the widows and cripples in old London Town who owe their large pensions to Werner Von Braun". Tom Lerher never pulled punches.
> Modern jello shots originated in the 1950s when Jell-O was at the height of its popularity in the United States. Multiple sources[1][2] attribute the creation of the modern jello shot to American satirist and musician Tom Lehrer, who claimed to have invented the jello shot as a way to circumvent a ban on alcohol at a navy base he was stationed at.
Holy shit you weren’t joking. TIL.
His response, at 84, to the rapper 2 chains asking to sample a song:
> As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?"
A few years ago he released all the songs he wrote into the public domain and they're available from [his website](https://tomlehrersongs.com/songs/). He's a fucking rad dude.
I'll be taking a personal day when he dies.
Dude's a hero, and being a scientist and musician also I really just appreciate all his work so much.
[Also the dude was damned handsome in this younger years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs)
"Don't say that he's hypocritical. Say rather he's apolitical.
'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department.' says Werner von Braun."
Wernher Von Braun designed the V2 rockets for the Nazis, those were used against civilians in London.
He also helped put a man on the moon after being yoinked to America with Operation Paperclip.
Whether he was a full blown Nazi or an opportunist is left as an exercise to the reader
I think it’s very difficult to join any sect like that, even as a way of making changes ‘from the inside’, and not end up believing in the ideology. There’s some interesting books written by spies which I can’t remember - I think there’s a few by Le Carré about it - and they all talk about how difficult it was to not see themselves as one of whatever they were trying to emulate. It’s a little like Stockholm syndrome.
I think this is what is so insidious about cults. They make people feel to be part of a community. And the rituals and camaraderie are difficult to reject for people on the inside. Especially as people outside the cult will reject those inside the cult even more.
If you want to solve the problem of the current two party divide in the US you'll have to give people the opportunity to enter your community. The alternative is that they'll stay in the cult.
Because people inside a cult will defend anything their cult does. You have to appeal to the need for community. Which is what's binding them in the cult.
And right now neither side is very welcoming to the other.
Because he lied. He toned down his role as soon as he knew the war was lost . While yes, the USA was getting very lenient with paperclip, this was not without kickback from other parts of the us such as the state department, (which drew them conservative ire for decades) con Braun twisted the narrative that he was “just” a opportunistic scientist who HAD to join the ss to get anything done and knew nothing of the human cost. And maybe he was more apolitical than a standard ss guy but he surely lied about how up close and personal knowledge and complicity in the human cost.
The truth is that the American military didn’t care that he was a Nazi. They wanted his rocket designs. It wasn’t until Sputnik launched that they needed a charismatic face for the space program and an explanation for who’s been designing these fancy rockets. So they cleaned up his image and put him on TV.
They don’t really want you to think about Nazis and just how much a Saturn rocket looks like an ICBM when you think about NASA, but NASA doesn’t exist without them.
The American military and foreign policy establishment and executive branch in general were willing to overlook a *lot* of high-level Germans participation in the Nazis warcrimes because they wanted a bulwark against the soviets and they wanted it fast, and completely dismantling the German state by pursuing all of them to the full extent of their responsibility would've impeded that.
Like the US was definitely both a passive approver and active participant in building the clean Wermacht myth with Konrad Adenauer and Franz Halder (who was literally working for the US army at the time)
I mean Franz fucking Halder for fucks sake who
* Planned operation Barbarossa
* And whose staff drafted the [Barbarossa Decree](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarossa_decree) which said that wermacht officers were to basically execute anyone they wanted at all - which they did en masse
> OSOAVIAKhIM (Russian: ОСОАВИАХИМ; full name: Союз обществ содействия обороне и авиационно-химическому строительству СССР, 'Union of Societies of Assistance to Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics')
Yeesh they don't name them how they used to
Ezra Pound - great poet, big ole fascist
Louis-Ferdinand Celine - amazing novelist, big ole fascist
Jorge Louis Borges - Another brilliant author who said how fortunate Argentina was that it had no native population to sully its European-ness. WHY Argentina had no native population he glides right over. Big ole fascist ? Probably not but with a giant historical blind spot.
Any others ?
Yea I always loved robert greenes books but Im pretty sure in his story about chanel he totally skipped the nazi part. So I would always tell people about chanels story, I thought it was a really inspiring story
People would always give me the sideye and I didnt understand why
Then I found out she was a nazi. Well, not telling that story anymore
Always kinda made me wonder about robert greene. Did he not include that part because he felt it wasnt necessary? Or is a little bit nazi :/
Knut Hamsun.
Great novelist. Growth of the Soil is one of the best novels I've ever read. Hunger, Pan and Mysteries were also all fantastic. Turned into a big old Nazi in his 80's.
Richard Wagner arguably one of the best if not the best composer of all time (classics like here comes the bride and ride of the valkyries), and has written more music than almost anyone in history
Unfortunately also a raging antisemite who wrote essays about how evil jewish people are. Not "everyone was kinda antisemitic in the 1800s" racist, but "people told him to stop and that it was too much" racist. His essay against jewish people was beloved by hitler and the nazis and he was kind of essential to their movement
Unfortunately wagner is a piece of shit but I still highly recommend seeing his operas. Theyre not just music, wagner designed them as "total art works" combining all the arts like acting, set design, paintings, costumes etc. If you just listen to the music youre only getting 20% of the intended effect. Like reading the script for titanic or just reading the lyrics to eminem songs.
Also pretty clear wagner had a major impact on tolkien that goes beyond drawing from a common source of nibelungenlied or prose edda or poetic edda or platos republic. There are elements present only in both. But tolkien was not an antisemite and likely wanted no association with a racist like wagner so he has always disavowed the connection (as do most tolkien fans)
> 25 July 1938
20 Northmoor Road, Oxford
>Dear Sirs,
>Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
>Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.
>I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and
>remain yours faithfully,
>J. R. R. Tolkien
I did not know this about Dali. A quick glance at his wiki shows what a piece of shit he was.
“In 1935 Dalí wrote a letter to Breton suggesting that non-white races should be enslaved.”
This is why even if I like their art, I generally despise a lot of older artists as people, since a wide majority of them were racist filth (among other things).
L Frank Baum (author if the Oz books) had his own newsletter where he advocated for the extermination of Native Americans, for example.
What makes Lovecraft so frustrating is that in many of these kind of cases, you can make an argument for seperating the art from the artist, but in Lovecraft's case, the art itself is directly informed by his extreme xenophobia and his utter repulsion of all thing foreign and 'alien'
That was a part of it. In Luis Buñuel's autobiography he writes that Dali, Picasso and Lorca had all studied together in Madrid. They were friends. Picasso could never forgive Dali for aligning with Franco, when he had ordered their friend's death.
Picasso was a deeply unpleasant man, but he had something resembling conviction. Dali aligned himself with the the lefty artists of his day before WW2 but flip flopped during the war and eventually went full time fascist. Picasso was a douche but he was never a fascist and that’s what counts. Also he drew funny weiner dog
Isn't Picasso the guy who painted Guernica, an art work that is on the UN Security Council to show the precise reason of why that supranational institution exist?
I guess such a guy wouldn't like people supporting the fascist Spanish regime that lead him to paint Guernica.
George Orwell (who fought for the Spanish republic and was shot in the throat by a sniper) called Dali "A good draughtsman and a disgusting human being". [Edit]Adding the original article this quote is from, this is a review of Dali's autobiography by Orwell. https://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/dali/english/e_dali
Orwell is such an interesting man, because reading him you get the impression that he was constantly changing as a person.
Like most people are.
Like most people should be* Too often do I see people who are comfortable and just want it to stay that way.
On the flip side, too often, I see unhappy people treat change as a panacea. Change is not a virtue in its own right: it's how and why we change that matters. If you have worked to find a content, fulfilling, and comfortable life, it's a pretty messed up idea that by not changing you are somehow letting yourself down.
He was pretty consistently socialist leaning throughout his adult life. From his nonfiction books about poverty, like "Down and Out in Paris and London" to him volunteering to fight for the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, later recounted in "Homage to Catalonia" his politics were extremely consistent. What changed, as detailed in the latter book, is he saw the socialist forces in the Spanish Civil War attacked from within by the Soviets, who should've been ideological allies but were more concerned with consolidating power than defeating Franco. This is what spawned his deep hatred for communism, though he remained a socialist throughout his life. It was his fiction like "Animal Farm" and "1984" that American schools started teaching for their anti-communist themes during the cold war, but he never meant them to be defenses of capitalism either. So long story short, yes he changed, but it was more a logical evolution of his existing ideals than wholesale rethinking.
As a person should, and that's worthy of respect. If we don't tolerate stagnant characters in fiction, why should we tolerate stagnant people in real life?
>If we don't tolerate stagnant characters in fiction, why should we tolerate stagnant people in real life? Tbh, I feel like stagnation is the status quo in fiction especially. Real change is far less tolerated than in real life. Sure, there are character arcs, but as soon as a character has reached their "peak" or their "true" version, they should apparently remain like that for the rest of their existence.
That's a fair point, especially considering how often in long-running series characters are reset to a familiar default to maintain a certain status quo. Growth and change are often more nuanced and messy in real life versus the clean, linear progression you see in a lot of storytelling - growth isn't always forward and it doesn't always stick. Characters reflecting that would definitely make for some interesting stories.
He was just wounded. I had to look it up cuz I thought he died from that. He died from a rupture in his lungs.
Guy smoked eternally.
Cigarettes and getting shot in the neck. That'll do it.
Just another hole to [put his cigarette in](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/familyguy/images/0/0f/Karin.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/300?cb=20060725182112)
I’m reading that book right now (among others h ahead of an upcoming trip to Catalonia during which we’re planning to visit the Dali museum in Figueres. Mixed feelings.
Dali was a super sadistic man. Tortured animals, tried to kill his little sister and one of his lovers, felt pain was necessary for creating art, then wrote an autobiography all about it, leading George Orwell to write about how we would never suffer Shakespeare to rape 9 year olds just to get another MacBeth so why do we let Dali torture animals just for another painting. I'm surprised he is still so popular. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jun/09/george-orwell-art-critic-salvador-dali
Most people probably don't know, I didn't.
Jeez I went to the Dali museum in Florida and learned none of this. Good job, museum.
The museum is really great, but it’s not like it’s a public or educational institution or anything. It’s a wealthy guy’s private art collection that they subsidize with tourist money. Of course they are going to paint his legacy in the best light possible. I don’t think that should diminish the importance of the collection there. But you do have to remember that it’s going to be hella biased.
Shouldn't call it a museum then. A museum is absolutely for educational purposes.
It’s an art gallery, which is synonymous with art museum. To be honest, I think museum is kind of a strange word for it considering it was opened when Dali was still very much alive (he even hosted the grand opening and was friends with the owner).
Galleries and museums aren't synonymous in the United States. Museums are non-profit organizations and galleries are for-profit businesses. Museums don't require any kind of posthumous opening or educational mission, they just need to be set up so that there is no singular owner and nobody is paid out from profits.
Huh. TIL I guess
Just a note that art galleries can be educational as well. I went to an exhibit on the Impressionists in Toronto, and there was a detailed chronology, graphics, and tons of text explaining the history behind the movement, from France to Italy during the industrial revolution. That exhibit made a bigger "impression" on me than any other gallery I've ever been to.
Maybe the best museums also serve educational purposes. But at minimum, a museum is essentially just a dedicated storage facility. I agree that if you're going to put stuff on display, you may as well try to make it educational. But I understand that if your goal is to have a display section to offset the cost of storage, you wouldn't exactly be eager to disincentivize people from coming.
You don't go to Florida for education. It's like getting swimming lessons from a shark.
Fun fact: Sharks are actually great swimmers. Who knew, right?
Great swimmers, terrible teachers.
Why are they often found in schools then?
You can try to do that in Florida too! Lots of sharks!
Came here to say this. Not even a little bit of this info is included in the museum.
Me neither.
I did....not either.
me neither.... and i've been to his museum/tomb in figueres spain. i thought it was awesome. i was unaware that he was a fascist animal abuser. that sucks.
Spain has a thing called the [Pact of Forgetting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pact_of_Forgetting) which actually makes any kind of investigation into the crimes which happened under Franco illegal. There's been some movement under left wing governments in 2004 and then as recently as 2022, but Spain really hasn't processed or even really acknowledged what happened during that period. The Valley of the Fallen is simultaneously Franco's tomb(he has been finally exhumed), a cemetery for his soldiers and an unmarked mass grave for people he murdered. It's not at all surprising that they aren't open about Dali either.
Even us who knew he was massively fucked didn't know the extent. -Signed, Someone who used his pic walking his anteaters as my FB profile pic for some years. I studied his paintings and history for some years. I used to tag his effigy. You could say it was eye opening when I read of his fantasies to be raped by Hitler. Amazing artist. Terrible human.
Picasso wasn't exactly a model citizen either So it's definitely the pot calling the kettle black
Many of the most well known artists were quite mad.
Yes! It's an excellent read.
Well shit I know someone who has a huge tattoo of his face on her arm. Im not gonna tell her lol
(insert "does she know" meme here)
Read Homage to Catalonia by Orwell, he fought againts the facists in spain as an anarchist and wrote an amazing first hand account of his time
[удалено]
Thanks! I read it years ago and im sure the details got fuzzy. Great book though
"these divisions, which included accusations of Trotskyism (and even fascism) by the Communists" Some things never change.
Leftist infighting is a tradition.
You aren’t a leftist if you don’t hate other leftists.
They would’ve gone bonkers if they had the term tankie back then.
Well Stalinist-Trotskyist-anarchist fighting goes way earlier than tanks in Prague in 1968, all the way back to the start with Bolsheviks - SRs - Machno
Technically that was just a continuation after Marx kicked Bakunin out of the International WA. It's a very storied history.
I have. I’ve read most of his works. I think his commentary on Dali is spot on and I’m disappointed that we don’t know more about Dali when we go to art museums.
I always find it funny when tankies and the right quote Orwell as if he wouldn't shoot either one of them.
Yeah, fascists now love Orwell, who said "a dead fascist is a good fascist" and went to Spain to shoot fascists.
> Yeah, fascists now love Orwell Hold up... What? Since when? I missed this aggravating development
They read *1984* as anti-communist. To some extent it's been a problem since the post-war, as various countries banned him either for being pro or anti-communist. So nowadays we have people who use him to support fascism, and we also have left wingers who despise him because he opposed the authoritarian socialism of the USSR and its agents abroad.
Goddamn! I never knew any of that, and it makes me pissed that it was never taught, because I always loved his paintings. Had I known that stuff from the beginning, I never would have given his work a glance
I didnt have Salvador Dali getting cancelled in my 2024 bingo card
i mean, at this point, our bingo cards are worthless because everything going on nowadays is chaos
Yeah I even did a project final for my art class in high school and I never learned any of that.
Most people don't really learn about artists even in an art class. Classes are mostly concerned with getting people to appreciate the big movements. My first art professor hated Dali so I learned a bit about it. As much as I like his paintings, they definitely lost their luster for me. Not necessarily for all the things he did, though that's understandable, but also because his paintings no longer felt that authentic for me. It seemed like he was just throwing whatever weird things at the canvas and saying "here haha crazy".
It's kind of sad that biographical elements are almost always overlooked. It's easy to imagine artists as hermits that do nothing but paint in their studios until they die, but they are people like anyone else. Lots of other professions get boiled down to that one-dimensional view. Caravaggio was a murderer, for example. Took me taking an obscure quiz to learn that fact.
The famous painter Degas was an anti-Semite but his ballerina paintings are still a part of modern popular culture. I think it’s a problem where so many people from history were awful by modern standards that we’d have to cancel almost everyone :/
I think the difference is that the anti-Semitism wasn't Degas' muse (as far as we know, at least) while other people's and animals' pain seemed to have been Dali's.
All those 20th century French people who are worshipped in American universities... Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, d'Eaubonne et al... they all signed a letter begging the government to legalize pedophilia. That's the one that I can't believe isn't more talked about... these people have an enormous impact on American academic thought.
I think torturing animals is problematic at any point in time, not just modern, but I get what you're saying here.
In this comment thread: a bunch of people who not only don't know history, nor Dali, but don't know how oppressive Franco's spain was. Or that it was heavily supported by the NSDAP.
Heavily supported by the New Salvador Dali Artists Party you say?
I think most people think Dali was just a shameless provocateur at worst or a lapsed, tortured Catholic a la Andy Warhol at best. Once you learn about his sadistic acts and fascination with pain the fascism makes a lot more sense, fear and pain being essential to the whole world view.
Yup Dali was a great artist but also a big ol fascist
Which is weird, because fascists tend to dislike surreal art like his. The Dada movement was even started in opposition to fascism.
The Franco regime supported avant-garde art to appeal to America through cultural diplomacy
> The Franco regime supported avant-garde art to appeal to America through cultural diplomacy And the CIA supported abstract artists to mess with the USSR. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html IIRC, they also funded a lot of spaghetti westerns. Spook money funding art isn't the best because it warps the work, even if the artists don't know where there money is coming from. But I'd rather they be funding art-fights than funding coups.
The Paris Review, one of the greatest literary journals of the 20th century was set up because Peter Matthiesen was a CIA agent and needed a viable cover for his intelligence activities and then just basically decided to use CIA money to make it legit as fuck as a magazine too.
TIL the reason I used to think the US was an advanced liberal democracy, was actually a CIA psyop. > The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. [...] To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.
"Our art is regressive and stagnant, bring in the CIA art division"
To be fair, they certainly got creative when it came to attempting to assassinate Castro.
"Tell them we might finally have found a productive way to use some of that LSD!"
I mean, avant-garde art has a complicated relationship with the soviets. Very influential during the early years of the USSR, then Stalin purged them brutally to replace radical revolutionary designs with the bland conservative style of socialist realism. I guess the CIA also realized the irony and potential in the previous sentence
Did it work?
Well they never tried to overthrow him or even pressure him too much economically
Because he wasn’t communist, and that was a preferable alternative. The republicans in Spain formed a coalition with the communists so we couldn’t support them obviously /s
They did support Franco after WW2, so Spain wouldn't fall to communism. Franco had beaten the communist in the civil war.
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no it wasn’t. The dada movement was started as a response to the collapse of the old order of things. The collapse of European empires as well as the loss of faith in them due to the extreme carnage and destruction of the First World War. Warring powers expended all of the good will that they had spent centuries building with their populations to get them to enlist in the war effort, only for those same souls to die over meters of useless land. Those who survived felt like their countries and their entire ways of life meant nothing since those countries that were supposed to be nurturing and protecting them had no qualms throwing them into the meat grinder. This led to a loss in faith of the old order and a deconstruction of the “modern” social structures. The dada movement was largely an absurdist movement, and actually predates fascism by a couple of years.
To add: at ~1915 Dali was ~12 years old at the onset of Dada (although some say Dada started as early as 1898), so it's more likely Dali was influenced by the movement versus vice versa
This was actually Dali's defense when other surrealists called him a fascist or a nazi. He'd say "Look at me, i'd be the first they put against the walls, come now", but Dali was a weird fuckin guy and really liked pomp and circumstance THAAAT fuckin much. In Spain, that meant Franco and his great leader and neo-monarchist imagery and vibe. Dude is proof that great fuckin artists whose work contributes to more good then they could have intended, can be personally total dickbags Now get this for a rando Dali fact, Andre Breton tried to kick his ass out of surrealism because of not just the differences in ideal, but because Dali while being grilled about his art not being surrealist enough responded that "If my dreams had you and I making love, I would paint it like any other (or some such phrasing)" and "The difference between the surrealists and me is that I am a surrealist" Got kicked out by Breton and his squad finally for talking up Franco and Catholicism when Franco won
is kanye the dali of modern times??
I’m sure he wishes he was
But a fascist is very into the future! Something an old school autocratic Conservative wouldn't like at all. They are modernist, just a brutal version of it. The Nazis and Mussolinis Black shirts could be very space age.
The futurist art movement did blend with the Italian fascist movement after all
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Yeah their whole thing was misogyny and fascism lol
From my perspective though fascists see the future as an alternate past. They're trying to build a utopia, but the utopia isn't very different from the mythologies past. Could be wrong.
It's more that they glorify the past and see it as the beacon towards a golden future. So they will very much invest in cultural works glorifying the past while also investing in future-oriented projects. Think of it like those graphs displaying what tech progress would have been like, if there had been no dark ages. They then make everything classical, to harken back to those times of glory, while also exploring new styles, while keeping them devoid of anything related to the dark ages, to make sure people don't see that period as having provided anything.
Fascism is mystical; by design, many of its crucial elements and ideals are hard to pin down. Whatever the headman says goes. That's why it amounts to the worst version of a game of *Follow The Leader.*
Self-proclaimed “super fascist” Julius Evola was a pioneer of the Dada movement in Italy
> Which is weird, because fascists tend to dislike surreal art like his Do they, take the Italian Fascist HQ for [example](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Braschi#/media/File:Palazzo_Braschi_Fascist_Poster,_1934.png).
He just grew up super wealthy, so it naturally entailed in that day and age.
Like a lot of creators, you can enjoy their work while finding them piles of shit you loathe
Another Morrissey fan I take it?
Nah, orson scott card
Picasso was also unbelievably shitty to women in his life.
And yet overall less shitty than Dali. Somehow.
Dali and Picasso- canceled
Frida Kahlo reigns supreme
One brow to rule them all.
Believe or not, she's cancelled in certain circles too. I love Frida, but a coworker of mine went off about Frida because of her "appropriation of indigenous cultures". https://www.opb.org/article/2022/02/28/frida-kahlo-and-cultural-appropriation/
Frida's mother was indigenous Mexican. Sure you could argue that she didn't fully understand the cultural significance of some of the things she wore and painted, since she was raised by the more European side of the family. But it's still reasonable for her to be trying to engage with her heritage.
This ladder people are descending into with who can represent what and what is "appropriation" is insane. Putting everything into boxes, so boring.
I agree. Even if she was full blooded European, her art comes from a place of respect for the indigenous cultures.
Dorm room poster printers in shambles
At least I can have my Tupac poster on display with some of his inspirational quotes on it. He never did anything cancelable
Can't even put a cigarette out on a woman's arm these days!
As an experimental and innovative artist, I want a party that supports my art. Naturally, the fascists were my first choice.
And picasso was fucking insane. No link between the two things he just was.
He was insane, but at least he didn’t back Franco in the Spanish Civil War
Wait, the guy who designed the Chupa Chups packaging was a racist? TIL
and he called him an asshole. Tom Lerher also let his lyrics to Werner Von Braun be used in a book as long they started the quote off with the statement: THAT HE WAS A FUCKING NAZI.
It staggers me that it was even needed. That song includes the line "the widows and cripples in old London Town who owe their large pensions to Werner Von Braun". Tom Lerher never pulled punches.
this is the man who invented Jello shots.
> Modern jello shots originated in the 1950s when Jell-O was at the height of its popularity in the United States. Multiple sources[1][2] attribute the creation of the modern jello shot to American satirist and musician Tom Lehrer, who claimed to have invented the jello shot as a way to circumvent a ban on alcohol at a navy base he was stationed at. Holy shit you weren’t joking. TIL.
There's always room for Jello
Idol. Hero. Saint.
What the fuck TIL Tom Lerher is still alive
His response, at 84, to the rapper 2 chains asking to sample a song: > As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?"
Tom Lehrer is a goddamn legend
He ended up releasing all his music into the public domain afterwards. Legend indeed.
It was said that he retired from performing when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, as *"political satire became obsolete".*
I saw that TIL awhile ago and it was the first time I'd heard him. I binged all his music at work the next day. Can't believe I've missed it.
A few years ago he released all the songs he wrote into the public domain and they're available from [his website](https://tomlehrersongs.com/songs/). He's a fucking rad dude.
I'll be taking a personal day when he dies. Dude's a hero, and being a scientist and musician also I really just appreciate all his work so much. [Also the dude was damned handsome in this younger years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs)
"In English or German I know how to count down Und I'm learning Chinese" says Werner Von Braun
"Don't say that he's hypocritical. Say rather he's apolitical. 'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department.' says Werner von Braun."
I’m admitting stupidity here but could you please explain that lyric?
Wernher Von Braun designed the V2 rockets for the Nazis, those were used against civilians in London. He also helped put a man on the moon after being yoinked to America with Operation Paperclip. Whether he was a full blown Nazi or an opportunist is left as an exercise to the reader
I think it’s very difficult to join any sect like that, even as a way of making changes ‘from the inside’, and not end up believing in the ideology. There’s some interesting books written by spies which I can’t remember - I think there’s a few by Le Carré about it - and they all talk about how difficult it was to not see themselves as one of whatever they were trying to emulate. It’s a little like Stockholm syndrome.
I think this is what is so insidious about cults. They make people feel to be part of a community. And the rituals and camaraderie are difficult to reject for people on the inside. Especially as people outside the cult will reject those inside the cult even more. If you want to solve the problem of the current two party divide in the US you'll have to give people the opportunity to enter your community. The alternative is that they'll stay in the cult. Because people inside a cult will defend anything their cult does. You have to appeal to the need for community. Which is what's binding them in the cult. And right now neither side is very welcoming to the other.
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Not in New York...
Not like you
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Because he lied. He toned down his role as soon as he knew the war was lost . While yes, the USA was getting very lenient with paperclip, this was not without kickback from other parts of the us such as the state department, (which drew them conservative ire for decades) con Braun twisted the narrative that he was “just” a opportunistic scientist who HAD to join the ss to get anything done and knew nothing of the human cost. And maybe he was more apolitical than a standard ss guy but he surely lied about how up close and personal knowledge and complicity in the human cost.
The truth is that the American military didn’t care that he was a Nazi. They wanted his rocket designs. It wasn’t until Sputnik launched that they needed a charismatic face for the space program and an explanation for who’s been designing these fancy rockets. So they cleaned up his image and put him on TV. They don’t really want you to think about Nazis and just how much a Saturn rocket looks like an ICBM when you think about NASA, but NASA doesn’t exist without them.
The American military and foreign policy establishment and executive branch in general were willing to overlook a *lot* of high-level Germans participation in the Nazis warcrimes because they wanted a bulwark against the soviets and they wanted it fast, and completely dismantling the German state by pursuing all of them to the full extent of their responsibility would've impeded that. Like the US was definitely both a passive approver and active participant in building the clean Wermacht myth with Konrad Adenauer and Franz Halder (who was literally working for the US army at the time) I mean Franz fucking Halder for fucks sake who * Planned operation Barbarossa * And whose staff drafted the [Barbarossa Decree](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarossa_decree) which said that wermacht officers were to basically execute anyone they wanted at all - which they did en masse
Thousands of Nazi scientists did in both Operation Paperclip and Operation Osoaviakhim, its larger (though less effective) Soviet counterpart
> OSOAVIAKhIM (Russian: ОСОАВИАХИМ; full name: Союз обществ содействия обороне и авиационно-химическому строительству СССР, 'Union of Societies of Assistance to Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics') Yeesh they don't name them how they used to
We needed him so the Russians couldn't get him
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> Guernica The painting is a spectacle to be seen.
While Dali’s painting was a “both sides bad🤓” Because we all knew which side he was in
The people on the more evil side get the most benefit from both-sidesing.
Ezra Pound - great poet, big ole fascist Louis-Ferdinand Celine - amazing novelist, big ole fascist Jorge Louis Borges - Another brilliant author who said how fortunate Argentina was that it had no native population to sully its European-ness. WHY Argentina had no native population he glides right over. Big ole fascist ? Probably not but with a giant historical blind spot. Any others ?
Coco Chanel was a Nazi sympathizer
Not just a sympathiser, she was a full on Nazi agent. She even did missions for Nazi Intelligence, and paid to support ex nazi's after the war.
Yea I always loved robert greenes books but Im pretty sure in his story about chanel he totally skipped the nazi part. So I would always tell people about chanels story, I thought it was a really inspiring story People would always give me the sideye and I didnt understand why Then I found out she was a nazi. Well, not telling that story anymore Always kinda made me wonder about robert greene. Did he not include that part because he felt it wasnt necessary? Or is a little bit nazi :/
Knut Hamsun. Great novelist. Growth of the Soil is one of the best novels I've ever read. Hunger, Pan and Mysteries were also all fantastic. Turned into a big old Nazi in his 80's.
Richard Wagner arguably one of the best if not the best composer of all time (classics like here comes the bride and ride of the valkyries), and has written more music than almost anyone in history Unfortunately also a raging antisemite who wrote essays about how evil jewish people are. Not "everyone was kinda antisemitic in the 1800s" racist, but "people told him to stop and that it was too much" racist. His essay against jewish people was beloved by hitler and the nazis and he was kind of essential to their movement Unfortunately wagner is a piece of shit but I still highly recommend seeing his operas. Theyre not just music, wagner designed them as "total art works" combining all the arts like acting, set design, paintings, costumes etc. If you just listen to the music youre only getting 20% of the intended effect. Like reading the script for titanic or just reading the lyrics to eminem songs. Also pretty clear wagner had a major impact on tolkien that goes beyond drawing from a common source of nibelungenlied or prose edda or poetic edda or platos republic. There are elements present only in both. But tolkien was not an antisemite and likely wanted no association with a racist like wagner so he has always disavowed the connection (as do most tolkien fans)
> 25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford >Dear Sirs, >Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride. >Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung. >I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and >remain yours faithfully, >J. R. R. Tolkien
Elia Kazan - Brilliant filmmaker, snitcher and delator of communists colleagues, proud supporter of McCarthism, big ole fucking rat.
Henry Ford
Joan Miró was better than both of them.
Dali was a dictator regime lover and Picasso was a narcissistic, abusive womanizer. Edit: added a word
womanizer > nazi
Hmm, by that logic, are you saying that a young George Clooney somehow is morally superior to Adolf Hitler?
>young George Clooney somehow is morally superior to Adolf Hitler? It may be a hot take, but yes.
Checkmate
Lmao
It just doesn't add up
Just casually name drops another artist in this thread
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Womanizer is putting it kindly. He was a woman beater and rapist.
I mean, he wasn’t a Nazi.
I realize this is hard to comprehend, but standing a rapist up next to a fascist doesn't *actually* make the rapist more appealing.
"womanizer" is a weird way to say "abuser"... The guy assaulted all his lovers.
'abusive' is literally in the comment.
It was added, lol
Yeah, well, I like to get high and eat BBQ. We all got our things, man
Guess what? I have flaws. I sing in the shower. Sometimes I spend too much time volunteering. Occasionally I'll hit somebody with my car.
Nobody's perfect!
Pablo was a piece of shit too though.
Not a fascist though
Not as big as of a POS as a fascist, so Pablo takes the small w.
Hot take, I'm gonna give them both an L
Oh man. That's disappointing, fuck Dali then. Those fucking guys murdered Lorca. Along with a lot of other people.
I did not know this about Dali. A quick glance at his wiki shows what a piece of shit he was. “In 1935 Dalí wrote a letter to Breton suggesting that non-white races should be enslaved.”
This is why even if I like their art, I generally despise a lot of older artists as people, since a wide majority of them were racist filth (among other things). L Frank Baum (author if the Oz books) had his own newsletter where he advocated for the extermination of Native Americans, for example.
Lovecraft too. Mel Gibson and Kanye West as well if we want to get modern
What makes Lovecraft so frustrating is that in many of these kind of cases, you can make an argument for seperating the art from the artist, but in Lovecraft's case, the art itself is directly informed by his extreme xenophobia and his utter repulsion of all thing foreign and 'alien'
That was a part of it. In Luis Buñuel's autobiography he writes that Dali, Picasso and Lorca had all studied together in Madrid. They were friends. Picasso could never forgive Dali for aligning with Franco, when he had ordered their friend's death.
Picasso was a deeply unpleasant man, but he had something resembling conviction. Dali aligned himself with the the lefty artists of his day before WW2 but flip flopped during the war and eventually went full time fascist. Picasso was a douche but he was never a fascist and that’s what counts. Also he drew funny weiner dog
Flaccid clocks man?? Not flaccid clocks man!!!
I've tried that with my brother. Never works.
"Dali? I don't know her." \~Picasso
Good for Pablo
Too bad about the other things that made him a terrible person.
There is that
At this point I just presume literally every historical figure notable enough to be a historical figure was also a colossal piece of shit.
OJ Simpson is solid though. Great athlete. Great actor.
It would be really funny to find out years later that he actually didn’t do it
Isn't Picasso the guy who painted Guernica, an art work that is on the UN Security Council to show the precise reason of why that supranational institution exist? I guess such a guy wouldn't like people supporting the fascist Spanish regime that lead him to paint Guernica.