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scum.
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without specific prior written permission. This document protected by the DMCA.
This license does not apply for non open source hypocrites.
This post is a work of art and should be destroyed
on
UNIX Process Cryogenics?
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Copyright (C) 2001 Paul Treanor
SHOULD ART BE DESTROYED?
Art, whatever the definition, has certain characteristics. It is equivalent to an entity, perpetuating
itself across generations. As a result, it is permanent. Art also implies certain value claims, about
the precedence of accumulative creativity over destruction. Permanence and accumulation cannot
be ethically legitimised. In practice, there is a stable geo-cultural structure, of ethnic and national
art. This structure is not ethically legitimised. The best response is a territorial separation of art.
KABUL, March 1 2001 (AFP via Yahoo News)
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban authorities said Thursday they have started destroying all statues in the country,
including the world's tallest standing Buddha statue in the central province of Bamiyan.
"The work started about five hours ago but I do not know how much of it (the Bamiyan Buddhas) has been destroyed,"
Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told AFP.
"It will be destroyed by every means. All the statues are being destroyed."
The poor, the weak and the oppressed do not speak in defence of art. The voice of art is the voice of privilege. But if that was the only defect of art,
then equality would legitimise art. There is not just privilege, there is eternal privilege, for art continues. Art is ancient tradition: worse than privilege.
Is it not time to destroy it?
Art is wrong because it is the past, because it perpetuates itself, because it is transgenerational, because it is culture, and because it requires the
suppression of anti-art to exist.
People argue about what art is. High art is still contrasted to popular culture. In the 1970's some class theories opposed elitist art. However, in
Britain, where Art an Enemy of the People was published in 1978, the response to "high art" was not rejection. It was the demand for subsidies - for
community art, minority art, women's art, or art of colour. A similar pattern applies all over western Europe. The existence of art is not an issue.
Policy simply accepts art: this is true for artists, for individual governments, and for the European Union. A policy consensus implies a definitional
consensus.
Despite the apparent disunity about what constitutes high art or authentic art, there is a deep negative consensus about its nature. This negative
consensus is common to all modern societies. Some things are not art, never:
a trans-Sahel railway
state formation
justice
a single European currency.
Seen from this perspective, it is the agreement about Art which is remarkable. Evidently there is something called art: and so to its defects.
The first defect of art is the antiquity of art. Some art is recent, of course, but there is no planned future art. In urban planning, for instance, there are
those who plan cities which are not yet built, and those who study urban history. In art, however, there is only art history: art is past-oriented, almost
by definition. Art is tens of thousands of years old. There is an immense volume of art from the past, even though most works of art are destroyed
deliberately (of that, more later). The sacrality of art is a sacrality of the past.
Art perpetuates itself. True, this is a reification, but it is an accurate one. It is the actions of people which perpetuate art: but the effect for the
opponents of art is as if art defended itself. I will use here exactly the same metaphor and analogy, that I used to describe the defects of
sustainability, the ethic of eternal structures.
Compare the lives of two twins, born in identical circumstances. However, one is pro-art, the other is anti-art. The pro-art twin can go to art school,
or study art history. There is no equivalent for the anti-art twin: no school of art incineration. Great social pressure to accept art is applied to one
twin. No similar pressure to accept art-destruction is applied to the other twin. Because art is a core value in all existing societies, the social and
employment opportunities of the anti-art twin will be limited. It is also the pro-art twin who is more likely to be elected or appointed to political office.
The value attached to art limits the opportunity of its opponents to take action against it. In this way art is a self-preserving structure. It is like a
religion, whose adherents systematically discriminate non-believers: if such a religion is in a majority, it will constantly improve its position of power.
The strength and functioning of this self-preserving structure can be appreciated, by imagining that there was no art, and no pro-art structures.
Transferring from an art-free world into the existing world, can be compared to transferring from this world, into a world objectionably different.
Cannibalism is a useful characteristic for this comparison, because it is almost universally taboo. Being transferred into a cannibal world, from this
world, would be extremely unpleasant for most people. They would be forced to accept that something they abhor is a normal part of society: that
there is apparently no possibility of reform, since everyone accepts it as normal. This is the situation for opponents of art in the existing world.
Art also perpetuates itself in a more indirect way. Art is often described as human endeavour or achievement, and it is indeed a product of human
activity. People are encouraged to consider art as a valued activity, to the exclusion of other activity. In many cultures it is regarded as a high form of
achievement: that in itself is a valuing of conservatism. Artists strive to produce good art, but what they produce is art, because the activity takes
place only in an art framework, a framework that already exists. It is accurate to say that art is conformity in itself, since artists must conform to the
norm of what art is. That norm will vary across cultures and in time, but only in the limiting case that everything is accepted as art, does it cease to
be restrictive. In practice, creative approaches to non-art areas are often socially un-accepted, or considered strange.
Art is transgenerational and open-ended. It perpetuates itself in the structural form described above, but art cannot be otherwise. So long as art is in
opposition to iconoclasm, for instance, then there is a difference in the value socially ascribed to activities. In almost all cases (and certainly in
modern societies) the accepted pattern is, that creation takes place by accumulation only. Iconoclasm (in the broad sense of art destruction) is
defined as a non-creative act.
There is no inherent logical basis for the restriction of creativity to accumulation. However, it is the form art takes, and that form is socially
accepted. Although there are millions of paintings already, painting a new one is defined as a creative activity. Reducing the existing stock is not.
Destruction is not considered of equal value to creation.
On the contrary, destruction of art is considered a crime, and a sign of mental illness. Entering a museum and destroying a painting is considered
shocking. Such acts are widely reported in the media, if they affect well-known works of art. This cannot be logically derived from a sacred status. In
religious activity, sacred is not always permanent. Sacrificial animals were killed in some religions, offerings were burnt. It would be logically
possible to treat art like this, but that does not occur. Art is not just sacred, its own accumulation is sacred, its permanence is sacred.
The continuance of art is therefore inherent in art. Art is for ever. That which can not end, is wrong, and must be ended. Permanence of any entity
constitutes a claim to all time for its existence, specifically against its non-existence. Claims to time are contra-ethical or morally arbitrary: one state
(existence of art) is favoured over another (non-existence of art) merely because it happened to exist first. It is possible to claim value for firstness
or primacy (as nationalist organisations of indigenous peoples do), but this cannot be logically derived. It is itself an arbitrary value.
The transmission of art also requires, that injustice be done to done who oppose it. Their opposition is valid, since there is no moral ground for the
permanence of art, yet they are discriminated against, as indicated above. Some employers, perhaps almost all, would refuse a job to anyone who
openly advocated the destruction of art. If such injustice is a necessary condition of art, and there is no other legitimation of its existence, then the
existence of art is an injustice, and should be terminated.
Just or unjust, self-perpetuating cycles and transgenerational structures, are contra-ethical. Art perpetuates itself, by accumulation, and the
transmission of the value of this accumulation. Cultures include, over generations, reverence for the permanence of art. More than this, art
perpetuates the transmission of culture including itself. Art is a central aspect of many cultures.
This permanence of art has been described here in abstract terms. In practice some real destruction of art does take place. The place of art in culture
determines this: real art is ethnic art, or national art. Art that disappears, has lost its central place in an existing culture - usually because that
culture itself has disappeared. The second part of this article, about cultures and art, is less abstract and more political.
There exists a geo-cultural structure, approximately corresponding to geopolitical structures. In practice, people refer daily to English culture, or
French culture, to ancient Egyptian art, to Brazilian art, or to the art of the Islamic world. The entities of this geo-cultural structure may be cultures of
nation states, of ethnic groups, of regions, or of larger entities called world-cultures or civilisations. They may overlap, in fact they usually do, but
that does not mean there is no structure.
The complexity of culture is sometimes used to deny its rigid and structural nature. However, internal complexity can be great, and yet exclude
external complexity. The possible moves in a game of chess are astronomically large, yet all chess games are chess games.
Consider a simple model, with unitary cultures of tribes. Tribe A invades the land of tribe B. Soon, within culture B there are pro-A collaborative
cultural tendencies, there are anti-A "B nationalists", there are A+B "multi-culturalists", their opponents in A, and B, who oppose cultural mixing, and
B revanchists. The land of A+B then invades the land of C. Now, in this land C, there pro-A collaborators, pro-B collaborators, pro A+B collaborators.
There are anti-A "C nationalists", anti-B "C nationalists", and anti A+B "C nationalists". And more: even at this level, the multiplying combinations
exceed simple factorials.
In the past there were thousands of cultures, associated with thousand of peoples. By some estimates, there still are. Combinations of their
interactions can generate an immense diversity of culture. Yet, none of that culture will be anything other than a combination of unitary cultures of
geopolitical entities.
There is every reason to believe that this is an accurate model of human culture and art: apparent diversity is hiding a huge range of possibilities
which do not fit the existing geo-cultural model. This applies to art as well. The implication of this is, that the models of culture developed in
anthropology in the 1940's and 1950's are accurate. (In fact these models reflect the general use of national or ethnic terms to describe culture).
These models were often linked to the idea of culture growth and decay, and similar organic or life-cycle metaphors. Their basis, however, was the
idea of a unitary culture corresponding to some geopolitical entity. A. L. Kroeber's 1944 Configurations of Culture Growth is a classic work of this
kind. In 1959 Rushton Coulborn could still take this approach to cultures or civilisations:
The style of a civilization is perceived as its aesthetic aspect: it is exhibited in everything the society produces and does,
pre-eminently in its arts, but also in its thought, its politics, its institutions, its traditions, and in all its ways. It is possible to qualify
a society's style, to comment upon it, to judge it even, yet hardly to describe it. It is the Chineseness" of what is Chinese, the
"Egyptianness" of what is Egyptian, the "Westernness of what is Western.
Since that time, this approach has disappeared from mainstream anthropology, only to reappear in the last 10 years, under the influence of ethnic
studies. An Afro-centric approach to art history, for instance, implies almost by definition a geo-cultural structure.
Why pretend, that there is no such a thing as African art, or English art? Partly because such approaches were discredited by their association with
Nazi Germany, or at least with Oswald Spengler and organic-social models of cultural history. But it was a common approach to history in the 1920's
and 1930s, and is now "rehabilitated" by the interest in ethnicity and identity. The model is cyclically in and out of academic fashion.
In any case, this approach is still, and always has been, the accepted approach in art history. Any introduction to art history (for students in Europe)
will present the standard sequence of styles in Europe: Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism. After that comes a
section on Islamic Art, or Oriental Art, which are assumed to have their own style sequence. In this case, the academic wisdom seems to be right.
In the end it cannot be proved that there is a geo-cultural structure of this kind: that is too much a question of interpretation. However, it does seem
extremely difficult to take the opposite position, that no culture or art is in any way associated with any particular people, culture, or territory.
In turn, this suggests an explanation of art: it is hyper-ethnic. Art is that within a culture which most approaches the core of that culture, and is least
accessible to outsiders. Art is the visible soul of the people, just as nationalists say. The question is, whether that gives it existence rights. It is here
that the manipulation of art-historical theory in defence of art must be noted. If art is associated with peoples, it can be associated with their state,
and so with the policies of that state - which may be unacceptable for many. Yet art never suffers from attribution of guilt by association: definitions
are manipulated, to absolve it.
If a person who is clearly a German Nazi, insists on the existence of a German art, and indicates clearly which works of art are German, what is in
that circumstance anti-Nazism? The non-Nazi defenders of art deny the truth of the claims: they say the possession of art must be disputed. They
would probably say, that in this case anti-Nazism consists in claiming that art belongs to all humanity: that it is universal. This opposition between
Nazism and universality cannot, however, justify the existence of art.
The alternative anti-Nazi position is to accept the claims as true, and destroy the German art, which the Nazi person has so conveniently listed. Not
just Nazi Germans produce such specifications: there are official lists of national art heritage, in most states in Europe. They are not intended for the
convenience of anti-nationalist iconoclasts, but they can serve that purpose.
If art is national, then it can have no legitimacy other than within the values of nationalism. If all art is national then it is legitimate to destroy it, if
anti-nationalism is itself legitimate. This legitimacy of destruction extends beyond nation states, to a geo-cultural structure in general. A geo-cultural
structure is merely one of many possible structures. The present structure is complex, but not self-legitimising. It is legitimate to oppose
pan-Africanism as a form of nationalism, and for instance, to destroy African art for that goal. Equally, it is legitimate to oppose a geo-cultural
planetary structure that includes all art, and in doing so to destroy all art.
Why not? Art is being destroyed all the time. So long as there has been art, it has been destroyed. In reality, the sacrality of art applies mainly to "our
art", not to "their art". If pan-Africanism, in 10 years time, is regarded as a form of imperialism oppressing the regional identities of the continent,
then perhaps people will burn portraits of Nkrumah. 20 years ago, statues of Lenin were art in part of Berlin. Now they are considered "propaganda of
the unjust SED state". 60 years ago, statues of Hitler were art in Berlin: now public display of any Nazi symbol is illegal. Today, art in Germany
means for instance statues of Konrad Adenauer, the pro-western post-war Chancellor.
The only constant seems to be, that art serves privilege, the nation state, the powerful, the established, the unjust. In general, art serves the existing,
which is exactly what is consistent with a self-perpetuating social structure.
It is acceptable to oppose art in general, and specific national, regional, world-cultural, or civilisational art. However, there is no wide support for the
break-up of the geo-cultural structure. The values of that structure itself are incompatible with its reform or abolition. It can however be limited in its
effects.
I therefore propose territorial separation of art. Formally, the best course would be to destroy existing art, then choose if the planet was to be
art-provided or art-free. However, there is no prospect of any global agreement on this. Art will be in opposition to non-art, inherently.
Specifically, I propose that the United States of America should become a zone of art. The existing cultural preference in the USA for collecting art,
(especially from Europe) should be expanded into a prime function of state.
Art should be transferred from Europe to the USA, beginning with the art listed in national heritage lists, and with recognised European heritage. I
propose as an initial step, the transfer of the Mona Lisa, the best known European artwork, to the USA. The Mona Lisa is old, and heritage. It is
better, that the past should burden the USA, than burden Europe. All artists, and those who wish to continue employment in the art sector, should be
transferred to the USA.
Any attempt at such a transfer would probably result in military intervention in support of art, perhaps by the USA. However, the nature of such a
military intervention is outside the scope of this article. In any case, it is probably true that, given the fundamental opposition between art and its
destruction, military conflict is inevitable in the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source hypocrites who violate my license (see below) are worthless scum.
OSD General Pubic License
--
Copyright (C) 2002 open sores d00d. Moderating and replying not allowed without specific prior written permission. This document protected by the DMCA.
This license does not apply for non open source hypocrites.
Copyright (C) 2001 Paul Treanor
SHOULD ART BE DESTROYED?
Art, whatever the definition, has certain characteristics. It is equivalent to an entity, perpetuating itself across generations. As a result, it is permanent. Art also implies certain value claims, about the precedence of accumulative creativity over destruction. Permanence and accumulation cannot be ethically legitimised. In practice, there is a stable geo-cultural structure, of ethnic and national art. This structure is not ethically legitimised. The best response is a territorial separation of art.
KABUL, March 1 2001 (AFP via Yahoo News)
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban authorities said Thursday they have started destroying all statues in the country, including the world's tallest standing Buddha statue in the central province of Bamiyan.
"The work started about five hours ago but I do not know how much of it (the Bamiyan Buddhas) has been destroyed," Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told AFP.
"It will be destroyed by every means. All the statues are being destroyed."
The poor, the weak and the oppressed do not speak in defence of art. The voice of art is the voice of privilege. But if that was the only defect of art, then equality would legitimise art. There is not just privilege, there is eternal privilege, for art continues. Art is ancient tradition: worse than privilege. Is it not time to destroy it?
Art is wrong because it is the past, because it perpetuates itself, because it is transgenerational, because it is culture, and because it requires the suppression of anti-art to exist.
People argue about what art is. High art is still contrasted to popular culture. In the 1970's some class theories opposed elitist art. However, in Britain, where Art an Enemy of the People was published in 1978, the response to "high art" was not rejection. It was the demand for subsidies - for community art, minority art, women's art, or art of colour. A similar pattern applies all over western Europe. The existence of art is not an issue. Policy simply accepts art: this is true for artists, for individual governments, and for the European Union. A policy consensus implies a definitional consensus.
Despite the apparent disunity about what constitutes high art or authentic art, there is a deep negative consensus about its nature. This negative consensus is common to all modern societies. Some things are not art, never:
a trans-Sahel railway state formation justice a single European currency.
Seen from this perspective, it is the agreement about Art which is remarkable. Evidently there is something called art: and so to its defects.
The first defect of art is the antiquity of art. Some art is recent, of course, but there is no planned future art. In urban planning, for instance, there are those who plan cities which are not yet built, and those who study urban history. In art, however, there is only art history: art is past-oriented, almost by definition. Art is tens of thousands of years old. There is an immense volume of art from the past, even though most works of art are destroyed deliberately (of that, more later). The sacrality of art is a sacrality of the past.
Art perpetuates itself. True, this is a reification, but it is an accurate one. It is the actions of people which perpetuate art: but the effect for the opponents of art is as if art defended itself. I will use here exactly the same metaphor and analogy, that I used to describe the defects of sustainability, the ethic of eternal structures.
Compare the lives of two twins, born in identical circumstances. However, one is pro-art, the other is anti-art. The pro-art twin can go to art school, or study art history. There is no equivalent for the anti-art twin: no school of art incineration. Great social pressure to accept art is applied to one twin. No similar pressure to accept art-destruction is applied to the other twin. Because art is a core value in all existing societies, the social and employment opportunities of the anti-art twin will be limited. It is also the pro-art twin who is more likely to be elected or appointed to political office.
The value attached to art limits the opportunity of its opponents to take action against it. In this way art is a self-preserving structure. It is like a religion, whose adherents systematically discriminate non-believers: if such a religion is in a majority, it will constantly improve its position of power.
The strength and functioning of this self-preserving structure can be appreciated, by imagining that there was no art, and no pro-art structures. Transferring from an art-free world into the existing world, can be compared to transferring from this world, into a world objectionably different. Cannibalism is a useful characteristic for this comparison, because it is almost universally taboo. Being transferred into a cannibal world, from this world, would be extremely unpleasant for most people. They would be forced to accept that something they abhor is a normal part of society: that there is apparently no possibility of reform, since everyone accepts it as normal. This is the situation for opponents of art in the existing world.
Art also perpetuates itself in a more indirect way. Art is often described as human endeavour or achievement, and it is indeed a product of human activity. People are encouraged to consider art as a valued activity, to the exclusion of other activity. In many cultures it is regarded as a high form of achievement: that in itself is a valuing of conservatism. Artists strive to produce good art, but what they produce is art, because the activity takes place only in an art framework, a framework that already exists. It is accurate to say that art is conformity in itself, since artists must conform to the norm of what art is. That norm will vary across cultures and in time, but only in the limiting case that everything is accepted as art, does it cease to be restrictive. In practice, creative approaches to non-art areas are often socially un-accepted, or considered strange.
Art is transgenerational and open-ended. It perpetuates itself in the structural form described above, but art cannot be otherwise. So long as art is in opposition to iconoclasm, for instance, then there is a difference in the value socially ascribed to activities. In almost all cases (and certainly in modern societies) the accepted pattern is, that creation takes place by accumulation only. Iconoclasm (in the broad sense of art destruction) is defined as a non-creative act.
There is no inherent logical basis for the restriction of creativity to accumulation. However, it is the form art takes, and that form is socially accepted. Although there are millions of paintings already, painting a new one is defined as a creative activity. Reducing the existing stock is not. Destruction is not considered of equal value to creation.
On the contrary, destruction of art is considered a crime, and a sign of mental illness. Entering a museum and destroying a painting is considered shocking. Such acts are widely reported in the media, if they affect well-known works of art. This cannot be logically derived from a sacred status. In religious activity, sacred is not always permanent. Sacrificial animals were killed in some religions, offerings were burnt. It would be logically possible to treat art like this, but that does not occur. Art is not just sacred, its own accumulation is sacred, its permanence is sacred.
The continuance of art is therefore inherent in art. Art is for ever. That which can not end, is wrong, and must be ended. Permanence of any entity constitutes a claim to all time for its existence, specifically against its non-existence. Claims to time are contra-ethical or morally arbitrary: one state (existence of art) is favoured over another (non-existence of art) merely because it happened to exist first. It is possible to claim value for firstness or primacy (as nationalist organisations of indigenous peoples do), but this cannot be logically derived. It is itself an arbitrary value.
The transmission of art also requires, that injustice be done to done who oppose it. Their opposition is valid, since there is no moral ground for the permanence of art, yet they are discriminated against, as indicated above. Some employers, perhaps almost all, would refuse a job to anyone who openly advocated the destruction of art. If such injustice is a necessary condition of art, and there is no other legitimation of its existence, then the existence of art is an injustice, and should be terminated.
Just or unjust, self-perpetuating cycles and transgenerational structures, are contra-ethical. Art perpetuates itself, by accumulation, and the transmission of the value of this accumulation. Cultures include, over generations, reverence for the permanence of art. More than this, art perpetuates the transmission of culture including itself. Art is a central aspect of many cultures.
This permanence of art has been described here in abstract terms. In practice some real destruction of art does take place. The place of art in culture determines this: real art is ethnic art, or national art. Art that disappears, has lost its central place in an existing culture - usually because that culture itself has disappeared. The second part of this article, about cultures and art, is less abstract and more political.
There exists a geo-cultural structure, approximately corresponding to geopolitical structures. In practice, people refer daily to English culture, or French culture, to ancient Egyptian art, to Brazilian art, or to the art of the Islamic world. The entities of this geo-cultural structure may be cultures of nation states, of ethnic groups, of regions, or of larger entities called world-cultures or civilisations. They may overlap, in fact they usually do, but that does not mean there is no structure.
The complexity of culture is sometimes used to deny its rigid and structural nature. However, internal complexity can be great, and yet exclude external complexity. The possible moves in a game of chess are astronomically large, yet all chess games are chess games.
Consider a simple model, with unitary cultures of tribes. Tribe A invades the land of tribe B. Soon, within culture B there are pro-A collaborative cultural tendencies, there are anti-A "B nationalists", there are A+B "multi-culturalists", their opponents in A, and B, who oppose cultural mixing, and B revanchists. The land of A+B then invades the land of C. Now, in this land C, there pro-A collaborators, pro-B collaborators, pro A+B collaborators. There are anti-A "C nationalists", anti-B "C nationalists", and anti A+B "C nationalists". And more: even at this level, the multiplying combinations exceed simple factorials.
In the past there were thousands of cultures, associated with thousand of peoples. By some estimates, there still are. Combinations of their interactions can generate an immense diversity of culture. Yet, none of that culture will be anything other than a combination of unitary cultures of geopolitical entities.
There is every reason to believe that this is an accurate model of human culture and art: apparent diversity is hiding a huge range of possibilities which do not fit the existing geo-cultural model. This applies to art as well. The implication of this is, that the models of culture developed in anthropology in the 1940's and 1950's are accurate. (In fact these models reflect the general use of national or ethnic terms to describe culture).
These models were often linked to the idea of culture growth and decay, and similar organic or life-cycle metaphors. Their basis, however, was the idea of a unitary culture corresponding to some geopolitical entity. A. L. Kroeber's 1944 Configurations of Culture Growth is a classic work of this kind. In 1959 Rushton Coulborn could still take this approach to cultures or civilisations:
The style of a civilization is perceived as its aesthetic aspect: it is exhibited in everything the society produces and does, pre-eminently in its arts, but also in its thought, its politics, its institutions, its traditions, and in all its ways. It is possible to qualify a society's style, to comment upon it, to judge it even, yet hardly to describe it. It is the Chineseness" of what is Chinese, the "Egyptianness" of what is Egyptian, the "Westernness of what is Western.
Since that time, this approach has disappeared from mainstream anthropology, only to reappear in the last 10 years, under the influence of ethnic studies. An Afro-centric approach to art history, for instance, implies almost by definition a geo-cultural structure.
Why pretend, that there is no such a thing as African art, or English art? Partly because such approaches were discredited by their association with Nazi Germany, or at least with Oswald Spengler and organic-social models of cultural history. But it was a common approach to history in the 1920's and 1930s, and is now "rehabilitated" by the interest in ethnicity and identity. The model is cyclically in and out of academic fashion.
In any case, this approach is still, and always has been, the accepted approach in art history. Any introduction to art history (for students in Europe) will present the standard sequence of styles in Europe: Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism. After that comes a section on Islamic Art, or Oriental Art, which are assumed to have their own style sequence. In this case, the academic wisdom seems to be right.
In the end it cannot be proved that there is a geo-cultural structure of this kind: that is too much a question of interpretation. However, it does seem extremely difficult to take the opposite position, that no culture or art is in any way associated with any particular people, culture, or territory.
In turn, this suggests an explanation of art: it is hyper-ethnic. Art is that within a culture which most approaches the core of that culture, and is least accessible to outsiders. Art is the visible soul of the people, just as nationalists say. The question is, whether that gives it existence rights. It is here that the manipulation of art-historical theory in defence of art must be noted. If art is associated with peoples, it can be associated with their state, and so with the policies of that state - which may be unacceptable for many. Yet art never suffers from attribution of guilt by association: definitions are manipulated, to absolve it.
If a person who is clearly a German Nazi, insists on the existence of a German art, and indicates clearly which works of art are German, what is in that circumstance anti-Nazism? The non-Nazi defenders of art deny the truth of the claims: they say the possession of art must be disputed. They would probably say, that in this case anti-Nazism consists in claiming that art belongs to all humanity: that it is universal. This opposition between Nazism and universality cannot, however, justify the existence of art.
The alternative anti-Nazi position is to accept the claims as true, and destroy the German art, which the Nazi person has so conveniently listed. Not just Nazi Germans produce such specifications: there are official lists of national art heritage, in most states in Europe. They are not intended for the convenience of anti-nationalist iconoclasts, but they can serve that purpose.
If art is national, then it can have no legitimacy other than within the values of nationalism. If all art is national then it is legitimate to destroy it, if anti-nationalism is itself legitimate. This legitimacy of destruction extends beyond nation states, to a geo-cultural structure in general. A geo-cultural structure is merely one of many possible structures. The present structure is complex, but not self-legitimising. It is legitimate to oppose pan-Africanism as a form of nationalism, and for instance, to destroy African art for that goal. Equally, it is legitimate to oppose a geo-cultural planetary structure that includes all art, and in doing so to destroy all art.
Why not? Art is being destroyed all the time. So long as there has been art, it has been destroyed. In reality, the sacrality of art applies mainly to "our art", not to "their art". If pan-Africanism, in 10 years time, is regarded as a form of imperialism oppressing the regional identities of the continent, then perhaps people will burn portraits of Nkrumah. 20 years ago, statues of Lenin were art in part of Berlin. Now they are considered "propaganda of the unjust SED state". 60 years ago, statues of Hitler were art in Berlin: now public display of any Nazi symbol is illegal. Today, art in Germany means for instance statues of Konrad Adenauer, the pro-western post-war Chancellor.
The only constant seems to be, that art serves privilege, the nation state, the powerful, the established, the unjust. In general, art serves the existing, which is exactly what is consistent with a self-perpetuating social structure.
It is acceptable to oppose art in general, and specific national, regional, world-cultural, or civilisational art. However, there is no wide support for the break-up of the geo-cultural structure. The values of that structure itself are incompatible with its reform or abolition. It can however be limited in its effects.
I therefore propose territorial separation of art. Formally, the best course would be to destroy existing art, then choose if the planet was to be art-provided or art-free. However, there is no prospect of any global agreement on this. Art will be in opposition to non-art, inherently.
Specifically, I propose that the United States of America should become a zone of art. The existing cultural preference in the USA for collecting art, (especially from Europe) should be expanded into a prime function of state.
Art should be transferred from Europe to the USA, beginning with the art listed in national heritage lists, and with recognised European heritage. I propose as an initial step, the transfer of the Mona Lisa, the best known European artwork, to the USA. The Mona Lisa is old, and heritage. It is better, that the past should burden the USA, than burden Europe. All artists, and those who wish to continue employment in the art sector, should be transferred to the USA.
Any attempt at such a transfer would probably result in military intervention in support of art, perhaps by the USA. However, the nature of such a military intervention is outside the scope of this article. In any case, it is probably true that, given the fundamental opposition between art and its destruction, military conflict is inevitable in the long term.
*burp*. i love you all.