The highest value of this post-Hitlerian aesthetics is the pluralistic postulate of the freedom and equality of styles, orientations and individuals, analogous to a social intention of expressing and making every work of art accessible. That leads to independence from stylistic pressures, value-standards and to power-struggle on the field of success that the market offers. The extended conception of art grants everybody the capacity of being an artist of more or less developed abilities, that is, a counter-movement to the alienation of the machine-men and computer-men in a world without handicrafts and without connection to the fundamental bases of our heritage. A Beuys-sled, a felt suit of attractive design in the shop window, cannot be better than other ones, extra-artistic criteria determining the value of good and bad, just as Beuys himself intended the overcoming of art in the historical sense. Where there are no more rules for determining good and bad, the Last Judgment, heaven and hell, beautiful and ugly, where these hierarchies of high and low, of central and peripheral interests, of human attempts at global responsibility towards the whole inevitably disintegrate in favor of the disparate parts, other resolutions will be made, other classifications will be developed, and that is here the dictate of the free market or of the controlled. Controlled through the changing fashions and powers, incalculable as good and evil, similar to the stock exchange of speculators, whose market value is determined by the noise that every individual is capable of making; one could say that it were the jungle-principle of life if there were no interests, tendencies, ideologies, unconscious threads of power, and, precisely even here, media, forces of minority interests, of opinion-laundering, and of education. They were developed according to the group instinct of commercial success beyond that gained by the purity or level of that achieved in contrast at the time. All representatives of the counter-values strive greedily to outdo each other in the other directions. The anti-attitude meant anti-European culture in its historical value standards of good and bad, without the spiritual relations of depth, and leads to the victory of the equality of the traders and their interests in the emptied space of cathedrals, castles, landscapes, cities, brains, and to the adjusted zone of the newly established world that has no basis.
Where the traders and the market determine success, and the media the ideology and the thought of the viewers as well as the opinions of the viewers and buyers, the freedom of the others is the lobby, in whose drawers the ideologies meet one another as the only freedom of plurality. One then calls them “free groups” or “urban district” cultures. They have the equality to conform to each other in paid protest. While some get their share at the beginning of the year as a subsidy for their museologically-directed good conduct, be it perhaps in the purchased protest approved by the press, the others eke out their share through the drawers of the lobby-ideologies of our plurality, with the pressure of the media as each case arises.
But the goal that follows analytical dissection instead of deepening for an exploration of the very reason of the heart is that multicultural wishy-washiness of general arbitrariness, where the Götterdämmerung of Richard Wagner is equal to a fast-food-porn video-clip. Unfiltered selfishness in the depths of the soul.
This means the self-fulfillment of emancipation for an upright course towards a world that understands man as a revolution controlled by himself, who takes for himself what he needs from all cultures, regardless of identity. This is the mollifying tactic of a bad conscience that has to be overcome under the sign of worldwide communication, which a few rule, and for all who are grouped under this system.
This ideological term “multiculturalism” is already used to characterize those practices that film as an industry of international co-productions makes possible. These are the films of the different nations in the English language, as though language were poured over them without spirit for the financial interests of the bigger market, so that the national taxpayers who finance European film through subsidies must now consume their products in English because the Americans cannot be expected to do otherwise. What is here an industry, a new colonialism and crippling of the mind is called multiculturalism, and film is just for starters. Art as the brothel of the age, if it is still art. The theaters imitate it in their aesthetics and literature and music, like all the others, offer themselves to it.
This arbitrariness of multicultural aesthetics leads to a claim to everything by everybody; the accepted and relished crippling of art as a revenge of the victor aesthetics over the master-race cult of the conquered conforms to non-committal activities and interests.
Since the aesthetics of the devil was called Hitler, and because the European culture of beauty, which is not profit-oriented and whose heroes were without financial returns, led to Auschwitz, the revenge is now art as the business of the ugly and mocking cripple.
Where art dreams most, business is not far (Adorno). What was once a critique as a warning has become today a cynical motto, like a sign of the day-to-day practice of an art of enrichment. When Buñuel let the cripples and beggars, the lowest of society, ravish a girl as a sign of innocence at a dinner for criminals in a stranger’s house to the sounds of Händel’s Messiah,80 it was an image of the suffering of beauty in the echo of the great tradition. The ugly is not allowed without the greatness of pain, and dirt would yet have greatness once again, which could not be sold to the masses, whom one needs as buyers in the mobilization of their lowest urges.
He who raises himself from the earth needs no art that dreams of the universe on earth. Everything a preparation — destruction of the basis, disintegration, burning of ships, painful, final battles — to conduct experiments, Hitler’s, the great accelerator’s, blood and soil, but also, under him, rockets and nuclear science.
Kleist in a steel helmet to Tell81 in a jeep. Multicultural, multi-historical, multi-psychological, multi-moral, we have arrived at the radical wishy-washiness of amusement in a lack of social entertainment, a talented country without a ministry of culture other than for schools and academia becoming a model for world culture and fair game for other power-interests in its cultural heart itself.
Through the loss of coordinates everything becomes equal. Arbitrarily good and bad, whore and virgin, styles and pictures, like the button-pressing of musical notes, like the costumes of various centuries at the masked festival of museum theaters. The Hermann battle82 as a Nazi melodrama, a genocide as a musical. The naïveté of an age and one’s country like strange laughter. The pill guarantees freedom of love, tins the effortlessness of cheap food, the TV brings the world into the house, the car and airplane transport us too. At what price? The costs lie beyond calculations of profit. Film makes art an industry and industry an art, the plastic of which we are made being a victory over the elements. Men run quickly out of the kitchens of their own cooker. Who would still want to scour them? Distant is the night-bombing in our hearts, deep below is the heart of pleasure, to know what pleasure, why.
Everybody with everyone, everything is possible, in place, in time, nations, races, food, plants, animals, populations. The state form of democracy corresponds to the workings of machines in which the parts, when they do not function any more, are replaced without sustaining crises, as even in diseases and their elimination, and in death, among and in machines.