Brett Olson

We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his

their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must be in a mass media society where art’s principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion.

so that the art experience is replaced by the excitement of peering at inaccessible capital.

In the Somme Valley the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Still-life, after all, was the chief image of private property in Western art.

certainly no artist before van Gogh would have carried the pathetic fallacy to such a pitch. 2.3Schwitters took it even further. Instead of painting junk, he transposed it into art – the thing in itself, tatty, stained, peeling, rusty, bent, torn, crumpled, but capable of redeeming itself through infinite combination, under the collaborative hand o

for Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, who fought in Flanders, or for László Moholy-Nagy.