IT’S A simple question really yet nobody seems to know what art actually is. Some will say the paintings by Turner and Constable are art and yet others will say works created by Hurst and Hemming are art.
Regardless of which category you fall into most people would say that a picturesque view of the French countryside could be considered art in one form or another whether you actually liked it or not.
But would it cease to be art once you knew who the painter was? Would is cease to be art and become propaganda when you found out the artist was Adolf Hitler? And if you found yourself in possession of a work by Hitler what would you do with it?
This is a dilemma which has been raised this week as a series of works attributed to Hitler go in sale at an auction house in Cornwall.
Holocaust survivors have said the works should be destroyed because of the acts he authorised after the pictures were painted. But doesn’t destroying the pictures lower us to the levels of Hitler who ordered the mass burning of books and art which his regime didn’t agree with? Or are we just trying to forget a part of our history we need to remember in order to prevent it happening again.
It was telling yesterday when a interviewee in BBC Spotlight said: “We should just forget about him” Personally I would say no we shouldn’t forget about him, we need to remember everything he and his regime did in order to make sure it never happens again.
This is much of the problem we have in this world, we choose to forget and then in the process make the same mistakes as before and then wonder why it happened.
Remembering Hitler and the Nazis doesn’t need to be at the forefront of our minds 24/7, but it does need to be in mind when those times arise when we see atrocity happen once again, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Chile and the Sudan to name but a very few. History keeps repeating itself because we the human race turn a blind eye and forget about the last time. We have never learnt the lessons of the past.
So would you still buy a piece of art by Hitler? And would you even still consider it to be art regardless of who produced it in the first place?