People of Reality Part II

A couple of weeks ago the Swedish Minister Göran Hägglund, Christian Democrat, started to argue about something he called the People of Reality. To the non-political scientifically trained this sounds like a harmless expression, especially as he talked a lot about ordinary people sitting at their kitchen table reasoning of how to deal with the troubles of everyday life. That image is supposed to fill the Swedes out there in their cottages with some kind of identification with Hägglund and his rhetoric.
Hägglund claimed that the People of Reality had had it now and would not be bullied by the intellectual cultural elite, harassing them about their taste in art, literature and entertainment. He failed to mention that he is a part of another elite – the ruling elite. Slip of the tongue maybe?
The problem with Hägglund’s arguments is that they link in to discourses that everything but democratic. But as a friend of mine once said: - Just because you have the word democrat in your party name does not make you a democrat! Pierre Bourdieu looked into this problem in his Distinction and came to the conclusion that our understanding of art comes from basically two sources, our family or upbringing and the type education we get. The latter is important as it orients us towards an ability to appreciate abstract art if we have a humanist or social scientist training, while engineering or a practical training tend to orient us towards more figurative art. This means that those who argue that you should see what the art work is actually wants to reach a certain public who appreciate that kind of art.

Igor Golomstok wrote a wonderful book about totalitarian art in the beginning of the 1990s. There he made the reflection that when the Soviet Union and the Third Reich presented their Pavilions at the World Exhibition in Paris 1937, the similarity in design was striking. You could actually see exactly what the motives were on every art item in the Soviet Pavilion as well as in the one of the Third Reich.

The Soviet and Third Reich Pavilions at the World Exhibition in Paris 1937.

Also in 1937 the Hitler regime had an art exhibition in Munich, called Degenerate Art. The idea was to show the German public the horrors of the art work performed by artists that the regime claimed was degenerated. There were painters like Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Marc Chagall, just to mention a few.

Adolf Hitler visiting the exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich 1937.

After the war this exhibition has been put together again because some art connoisseurs think that it actually is the greatest collection of early 20th century art exhibited at the same time ever.
This road is now taken by Hägglund and the Christian Democrats and of course it is because they are having a rough time in the opinion polls. It seems easy enough to try and take some of the would be voters of the xenophobic Swedish Democratic Party.
Maybe Hägglund wants to put together his own exhibition of the art preferred by the People of Reality as they dwell by their kitchen tables… here is a good start…

Classic mass produced painting of Fisherman with pipe.

Sources:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

Golomstok, Igor (1990) Totalitarian Art - in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China.