850 James Connelly

Art as Protest

James Connelly
Southampton Institute

‘Art, Magic and Propaganda in the Principles of Art’

Summary

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief account of part of Colling-

wood’s philosophy of art, in particular that dealing with the relationship be-
tween art, craft and magic, and to consider some of the implications for the
aesthetic evaluation of ‘works of art’ produced as moral or political propa-
ganda.

Collingwood’s account of art

In The Principles of Art Collingwood identifies art with language and with the ex-
pression of emotion. Following an examination of different senses of the term art,
he distinguishes it from other things often mistaken for it, such as craft in gen-
eral and amusement and magic in particular. It is distinguished from craft because
the artist never has a clear mental picture of the end product prior to producing
it. This is because the expression of emotion is not simply the representation of
something already fully formed and waiting in the wings to make an entrance. On
the contrary, to express an emotion is to become aware of what it is. Prior to its
expression it cannot be clearly stated: it is only in being expressed that its pre-
cise nature reveals itself. This revelation is the work of the aesthetic imagination:
‘the aesthetic experience, or artistic activity, is the experience of expressing one’s
emotions; and that which expresses them is the total imaginative activity called
indifferently language or art’. The distinction between art and craft is well sum-
marised by Hospers:
‘The artist is engaged in expressing emotions. In the process of
expression, what was turbid and unclear to him gradually becomes
clarified and ordered; and until the process of expression is completed,
the artist does not know exactly what it was he wanted to express. The
artist’s cousin, the portrait-painter, who employs the same physical
medium, does know in advance what he wants: he wants the painting
to resemble the sitter as much as possible; as such he is a craftsman
not an artist. Such a craftsman, knowing in advance what he wants
the end product to be like ... seeks the best technique for producing
it. ... He does not himself feel the emotions he wants his audience to
feel; he is expressing nothing at all to himself; he is not, indeed, en-
gaged in expressing emotion at all, but in arousing emotion in others.
And doing this is a craft. Propaganda art, religious art, amusement art
... . all these know the end in the beginning’; they are crafts involving
R.G.Collingwood, The Principles of Art, Oxford, 1938, p.275.
Art, Magic and Propaganda in the Principles of Art 851

means to a preconceived end. In any craft the craftsman must know

(the more precisely the better) the result he wants to achieve before
he sets out to achieve it; but the artist does not know the result of his
achievement until he has achieved it. ... Therefore the artist is not,
and cannot be, a craftsman.’

A craftsman preconceives his product and therefore those who seek to evoke or
arouse particular emotions are craftsmen. In so far as they are skilled in doing so
they are good craftsmen. The activity of the artist as such is different. It is ex-
ploratory in that prior to the act of expression he or she cannot specify what the
emotions are and therefore cannot specify the exact form that the finished work of
art will take. For the artist in the throes of artistic creation the primary concern has
to be the full imaginative experience of conceiving the work of art itself. Losing
sight of this and subordinating the artistic impulse to something external neces-
sarily detracts from its aesthetic qualities. Collingwood discusses this point in his
1927 lecture on ‘Aesthetic’:

‘A man may be led to write a poem by looking at his pass-book

and saying, “heavens! I must do something to wipe off this over-
draft”; but if, while he is actually writing a poem, he keeps thinking
of its market value, the poem will be a pot-boiler, that is to say, not a
poem at all but a fraudulent imitation of one. I do not say that he must
forget his overdraft; on the contrary, he may write a poem about his
financial difficulties which, if he is as good a poet as Chaucer, may be
as good a poem as Chaucer’s “complaint to his empty purse”; but a
poem about an overdraft is not the same thing as a poem designed to
remedy an overdraft. The poem succeeds in being a poem only if the
intention of wiping off the overdraft is subordinated to the intention
of writing a good poem; and no one who is at all acquainted with the
writing of verse can fail to see that when Chaucer was actually com-
posing the exquisite refrain – “Beth hevy agin, or elles mote I die”, he
was at the moment far more interested in the perfect flow of his line
than in ways and means of refilling his purse.

Collingwood’s distinction between art and craft is not quite so sharp as it at

first appears. He is looking for the distinguishing characteristic of a work of art
and he finds this not in any feature of the art object but in the process leading to
its production. But he accepts that any actual work of art will probably include
within itself features which do not belong to art proper. There will be an overlap
of categories in that something can be at the same time art and craft and magic and
amusement: the point is that what makes it art is not the same as what makes it
these other things. Therefore the admission of overlap is neither a disqualification
of something as a work of art nor a refutation of Collingwood’s claim that there
are genuine and important distinctions to be drawn between art, craft, amusement
and magic. As Diffey expresses it:

J.Hospers, ‘The Croce-Collingwood Theory of Art’, Philosophy, 31/119, p.293-4.

R.G.Collingwood, ‘Aesthetic’, in R.McDowall (ed), The Mind, Longmans, 1927, pp.218-219.
852 James Connelly

‘A work of art can be representational, amusing, etc, but it is not

a work of art in virtue of these other things. What makes something
a work of art is not what makes it craft, magic, amusement, etc, and
conversely, something that is craft, magic or amusement is not in virtue
of that fact a work of art. But something can be both art and craftsmanship.’

Magic and propaganda

Collingwood devotes a section of The Principles of Art to a consideration of what
he terms ‘magic’. By this he dos not mean magic conceived as pseudo-science,
but the use of art’ as a means to the evocation and stimulation of certain sorts of
emotion typically associated with adherence to a creed or a practice or a form of
politics. When he describes something as propaganda or magic he is not thereby
disparaging it. On the contrary:

‘Magic is a representation where the emotion evoked is an emo-

tion valued on account of its function in practical life, evoked in or-
der that it may discharge that function, and fed by the generative or
focusing magical activity into the practical life that needs it. Magi-
cal activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical
life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence magic is a ne-
cessity for every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in
every healthy society. A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that
it has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion,
or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own
maintenance.’

This view, which Collingwood developed and explored in a series of unpub-

lished manuscripts on civilization, magic and anthropology in the late 1930s, is
repeated almost verbatim in his 1940 article on ‘Fascism and Nazism’. Magic and
propaganda are required by all societies, but they should not be confused with art
as such. The two categories may overlap, and this often makes for difficulty in
assessing the aesthetic value of something whose primary function is magical or
propagandistic. Both magic and propaganda are means to an end, an end given in
advance, and they are successful in direct proportion to their success in generat-
ing the emotions appropriate to realising that end. They are thus, to that extent,
craft and not art. They become susceptible to aesthetic appreciation or judgement
only in so far as they overflow the boundaries between craft and art. In so far as
they remain at the level of mere craft they should be judged solely according to
their success or failure in arousing the emotions they are intended to arouse, for
if they fail to arouse them they are, qua craft, failures. In art proper there are no
means and ends as such and the emphasis is on the honest expression of emotion.
The artist’s eyes should not be on an end external to the work of art, but one inter-
nal to it: the imaginative activity leading to the honest and accurate expression of
emotion.
T.J.Diffey, ‘Art and Goodness, British Journal of Aesthetics, 25/2, 1985, p.193.
Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p.69.
Art, Magic and Propaganda in the Principles of Art 853

Collingwood tends to argue that works of magic will, as a matter of fact, be

aesthetically inferior, although he allows that this is not necessarily so. In referring
to magical practices, objects and rituals he observes that:

‘regarded from the strictly aesthetic point of view, all these ... are
in general as mediocre as an average Academy portrait, and for the
same reason. The artistic motive is present in them all; but it is en-
slaved and denatured by its subordination to the magical. Hymn tunes
and patriotic songs do not as a rule inspire respect in a musician. ...
But this is of a piece with the strictly magical character of these ritu-
als: or rather, with the representative character of which their magical
character is one specific form. ... They have a primary function which
is wholly non-aesthetic: the function of generating specific emotions
... they may in the hands of a true artist ... become art as well.’

His point is, then, not that a work of magic cannot transcend its origin and be-
come a work of art; rather, that it need not do so in order to achieve its purpose,
and consequently it will not generally do so, unless the ‘artistic and magical mo-
tives are felt as one motive’. It is therefore a mistake to judge a work of magic
solely by aesthetic criteria:

‘Many things which are or might be called art ... are in fact a com-
bination of art and magic in which the predominant motive is magi-
cal. What is demanded of them is that they should discharge a mag-
ical function, not an artistic one. If a music critic tells us that God
Save the King is a bad tune, well and good; it is a matter on which
he has a right to speak. ... But if he goes on to tell us that we ought
on that account to replace it with a new national anthem by a better
composer, he is confusing an artistic question with a magical one. To
condemn magic for being bad art is just as foolish as to praise art for
being good magic. And when we find an artist trying to convince us
that our public statues, for example, are artistically bad and ought on
that account to be demolished, we cannot help wondering whether he
is a fool or a knave: a fool for not knowing these things to be primar-
ily magic, valuable for their magical qualities and not at all for their
artistic, or a knave for knowing this perfectly well, but concealing it in
order to use his own artistic prestige as a stalking-horse behind which
he can make a treacherous attack on the emotions which bind our so-
ciety together.’

The value of art

Matthew Kieran distinguishes ethicism as the notion that art proper, however indi-
rectly, prescribes and guides us toward a sound moral understanding of the world’

Ibid, pp.76-7.
Ibid, p.77.
Ibid, pp.93-4.
854 James Connelly

from aestheticism in which ‘the spheres of morality and art are thought of as au-
tonomous rather than complementary’. Where do Collingwood’s arguments stand
in relation to this distinction?
For Collingwood art mattered enormously and he made what many would re-
gard as vastly inflated claims about its importance. Thus he certainly cannot be
classified as an aestheticist; but equally he was not an ethicist. Both, he would
assert, are correct in what they assert, but wrong in what they deny. To say, for
example, that all art is quite useless’ is valuable as a protest against the assimila-
tion of art to craft or magic, but false in that it denies both the centrality and the
importance of art in human life. Again, there is a sense in which art promotes ‘a
sound moral understanding of the world’ but this does not and cannot mean that
we judge the value of a work of art solely in ethical rather than aesthetic terms. For
Collingwood, a work of art can only be truly valuable if it is has been produced for
its own sake and not with an eye to its utility or the responses of an audience.
Why is the ability to express emotions honestly so important for Collingwood?
The answer lies in his doctrine of the corruption of consciousness. When a mind
refuses to acknowledge and correct error it has been corrupted. A corrupt con-
sciousness is one which arrests itself and refuses to acknowledge its true nature.
Corruption arises in the transition from the psychic to the conscious level of expe-
rience and it occurs when this transition is unsuccessful; that is, when the expres-
sion of emotion is distorted as a result of disowning part of experience, repressing
it and refusing to admit its existence. The disowned feeling does not disappear,
but lives on in its unexpressed form. Thus the mind’s account of itself and of its
activities is distorted at the very root. This corruption distorts and renders false
everything built upon it:

‘To know ourselves is the foundation of all life that develops be-
yond the merely psychical level of experience. Unless consciousness
does its work successfully, the facts which it offers to the intellect, the
only things upon which intellect can build its fabric of thought, are
false from the beginning. ... The falsehoods which an untruthful con-
sciousness imposes upon the intellect are falsehoods which intellect
can never correct for itself. In so far as consciousness is corrupted,
the very wells of truth are poisoned. Intellect can build nothing firm.
Moral ideals are castles in the air. Political and economic systems are
mere cobwebs. Even common sanity and bodily health are no longer
secure.’

How can corruption of consciousness be avoided? Collingwood answers, ‘through

art’. Art is not merely the activity of ‘artists’, but an inescapable part of life. Bad
art is the corruption of consciousness, and the only remedy for bad art is good art:
Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of
consciousness’. It is not only the artist’, but each one of us, who must assume
responsibility for combatting the corruption of consciousness through the honest
M.Kieran, ‘Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals’, Philosophy Department, University
of Leeds, pp.1-2.
R.G.Collingwood, The Principles of Art, pp.284-5.
Ibid, pp.336.
Art, Magic and Propaganda in the Principles of Art 855

expression of emotion. Further, he contends that art and language are the same;
thus each one of us is an artist, and each one of our gestures and utterances is a
work of art. The role of the specialist ‘artist’ differs only in that he or she is able
to express the emotions of a community and by so doing enabling it to become
aware of feelings it would otherwise disown.
Thus Collingwood is an ethicist at one level, but the ethical importance of art
is unrestricted by subject matter. It concerns art as the honest expression of emo-
tions, whatever they are, no matter how disreputable we think them to be, or how
much we might wish to disown them. There is thus a close relation between art
and ethics because ethics, as practical thinking, presupposes the foundation pro-
vided by the act of artistic expression. Bad art in all of us leads to bad practice;
good art does not guarantee good practice, but it is the only condition on which it
is possible. On the other hand there is a clear sense, as we have already seen, in
which Collingwood is an aestheticist. He argues that art has to be pursued or its
own sake and guided by its own criteria, for it is precisely this which distinguishes
it from craft. If pursued for its own sake it achieves, not the value of craft which
consists in attaining a given end, but something different and far more important.
The paradox for both the pure ethicist and the pure aestheticist is therefore that art
only has the enormous value which Collingwood ascribes to it if pursued strictly
for its own sake.

The magic of Leni Riefenstahl

Art works are and always have been judged according to their perceived moral-
ity or immorality, or political virtue or vice. From Plato, via the Catholic Church,
to Stalin and Hitler they have been subject not only to political approval or dis-
approval, but also to condemnation and censorship. The very fact that the state
concerns itself with the power of art in this way is the negative aspect of Colling-
wood’s positive affirmation of its value in human life. In literature and the visual
arts the urge to censor or direct artistic activity is obvious, commonplace and easy
to understand. It is perhaps less easy to understand in the case of music, and this
is well illustrated by the somewhat puzzled remarks to that effect in a recent is-
sue of Classic CD devoted to censored classics. Thus the Catholic Church pro-
scribed certain scales and intervals, for example, castigating the flattened fifth as
‘diabolus in musica’ and the Ionian mode as ‘the modus lascivus’. Parallel mod-
ern examples are easy to find, whether the banning of jazz in Nazi Germany or the
Soviet Union’s attitude to the music of Shostakovich. During the Chinese Cultural
Revolution Western composers were categorised as ‘useful and harmless’, ‘use-
less and harmless’ or ‘useless and harmful’. However, whether or not we agree
with Stravinsky in his claim that ‘music expresses nothing other than itself’, our
present concern lies with literary and pictorial representation where there is a rel-
atively easily recognised moral or political subject matter. It is, of course, a com-
monplace to claim that a book or poem can provide examples of political or moral
virtue: the aesthetic problem arises when the presence or absence of these features
is considered a necessary part of the aesthetic value of the work of art. Just as we
are familiar with works of art depicting virtue, we are also familiar with works of
art depicting vice: and far from these being necessarily poor art works, we often
856 James Connelly

argue that, on the contrary, some artworks containing or depicting immorality or

undesirable political activity are aesthetically praiseworthy. The easy way out is
always to draw a sharp distinction to the effect that ethical criteria as such are one
thing and aesthetic criteria quite another, and that a work can have an aesthetic
value independent of its subject matter and that an artwork should not therefore be
judged for good or ill solely on the basis of its subject matter. This consideration
is sufficient to dispose of many objections to works of art on the grounds that they
are ‘immoral’.
However, there is an implicit assumption in this argument to the effect that the
aesthetic value of treating of an immoral subject matter emerges out of the way
in which it is treated. Is it, for example, idealised, promoted, justified, explored,
understood, or what? Has the artist provided us with an honest and bold treat-
ment of a difficult subject which genuinely illuminates it and shirks no aspect of
its awkward and challenging character? Or has he or she treated the subject mat-
ter dishonestly, partially or selectively (perhaps through the pursuit of an ulterior
purpose or through personal reluctance to face up to the real nature of the sub-
ject matter) and without seeking to explore its ambiguities and resonances? If the
latter, we are inclined to say that it lacks depth and hence lacks aesthetic quality.
The implication of this takes us away from the simple view that art is immoral if
it deals with a subject matter which is immoral and moves us towards a different
view in which we can assess the aesthetic worth of a work of art (at least in part) by
judging the manner in which it addresses its immoral subject matter. This is what
Kieran seeks to do. He dos not wish to establish or re-establish a simple-minded
link between the immorality of the subject matter and the supposed immorality of
the work of art; but neither does he want to adopt the line of the pure aesthete who
argues that the one is entirely independent of the other.
Art, Magic and Propaganda in the Principles of Art 857

Thus the issue becomes not that of what the subject matter is per se, but how it
is dealt with, and here Kieran argues that certain ways of dealing with an immoral
subject matter are sufficient for us to judge the aesthetic value of an art work ad-
versely. In particular, he argues that to the extent to which a work of art promotes
immorality it is to that degree disbarred from being aesthetically valuable. In mak-
ing this claim he discusses, amongst others, the work of Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi
Germany.
‘What Riefenstahl’s work attempts to show us is that a particu-
lar imaginative understanding of the Nazis and their Fuhrer is appro-
priate. The work cultivates in us the imaginative understanding that
the destiny to which the Nazis march is one of a glorious, righteous,
victorious crusade against the impure forces of the world. Now, we
can recognise the innovative and artistic way our imaginings are pre-
scribed towards this understanding by the film ... . However, the
imaginative understanding these imaginings are directed toward pro-
moting is itself radically flawed.’
In what way is the imaginative understanding radically flawed? It is flawed
because
‘The imaginative understanding promoted is ... fundamentally at
odds with virtually every significant aspect of the true nature of Nazism.
That is, the imaginative understanding promoted constitutes a funda-
mental and radical misunderstanding of what it represents. Far from
being an appropriate description, it cultivates a radically unsound imag-
inative understanding. It does not promote true insight but only the
admiration of a viciously immoral creed. Therefore, though it is of
artistic value, The Triumph of the Will cannot be a truly great art-
work. It is of artistic value because of the way it prescribes partic-
ular imaginings. Nevertheless, it is of artistic disvalue to the extent it
promotes a fundamentally false imaginative understanding of its sub-
ject. The insight and imaginative understanding art aims to promote
constitutively includes moral understanding. Therefore, to the extent
a work promotes immoral imaginative understandings of the world, it
is deeply flawed and thus disvaluable as an artwork.’
The film is flawed because it is dishonest in that it presents a false account of
Nazism, portraying as moral something which is immoral. But there is a dilemma
here. Is the objection simply that it presents a false imaginative understanding of
its object? If so, this could be true of any object at all, including, for example,
liberalism or something else of which we morally approve. Or is the objection,
on the other hand, that its badness as art derives directly from the substantive eth-
ical wrongness of Nazism, not just the imaginative misrepresenting of it? In this
case Nazism could only be made palatable by imaginatively misrepresenting it,
because an honest account of it would necessarily present it as something obvi-
ously objectionable, therefore a palatable account is a dishonest one and for that
reason aesthetically flawed.
Kieran, op cit, p.15.
Ibid, pp.15-16.
858 James Connelly

For Collingwood the issue would be different: he could simply categorise the
film as predominantly magic, as a means to an end, that end being the arousing of
emotions appropriate to the promotion of Nazism. In Collingwood’s view, to the
extent that something is merely craft, arousing emotions and working to a given
end, it is not art and so the evaluation of it qua art is misplaced. At the same time,
because art and craft can overlap, he would allow that it could at the same time
be art. The extent to which it succeeded artistically would depend on the relative
ascendancy of the magical or artistic impulse in the author’s mind. Riefenstahl
might be deluded as to her independent artistic status but that is no reason to deny
the absence of a genuine artistic impulse in her work. The ethical wrongness of
Nazism as such is a different matter: Collingwood would certainly judge Nazism
to be immoral, but his grounds for claiming that Triumph of the Will was not a
work of art or not a great work of art would simply be that it had subordinated
itself to a given end, irrespective of the nature of that end. Whether the object of
attention was liberalism or Nazism would make no difference to the question of
whether the artwork was good or bad. The answer to that question arises from the
elements of craft it contains and the extent to which it transcends them: in so far
as it is craft it is not art; in so far as it contains artistic elements it can be judged
good or bad as art.
But is this the end of the matter? Clearly the question of the aesthetic value
of Triumph of the Will can be taken in several ways. First, it could simply be ar-
gued that anything which is associated in any way with the promotion of Nazism
is ipso facto artistically devalued. Secondly, it could be argued that it is impossible
to produce an honest work of art in the promotion of Nazism because propaganda
is craft and therefore flawed as art. Either the honesty of the expression suffers,
in which case in Collingwood’s terms there is a corruption of consciousness, or
the artist follows honesty of expression and thereby deviates from the true path of
propaganda, because there is no way of knowing in advance whether what will be
produced will serve as a work of propaganda. It is possible that it might, but this
would be a massive coincidence. Of course, as pointed out above, so far we could
substitute liberalism for Nazism and the same argument would apply. Thirdly, it
be claimed that because the attempt to express artistically and imaginatively the
glories of the Nazi regime is almost impossible to do honestly, it is completely im-
possible for the propaganda artist who, despite his or her best efforts, is constantly
dragged down from their artistic aspirations by their subject matter. At this point
we have to ask whether the charge could be made that the very attempt to express
something ethically objectionable necessarily has an adverse effect on the artwork
itself. Kieran’s answer appear to be yes, in that it vitiates the artistic imagina-
tion. Is this because it reduces the artwork to a craft work? It is certainly a feature
of magic, conceived as craft, that it does not provide a genuine and authentic ac-
count of its subject matter. Both Kieran and Collingwood could perhaps therefore

This judgement might clash with Riefenstahl’s own view which was ‘aestheticist’ in that she saw
herself as freely dealing in images, irrespective of their moral or political content. It is not possible to
adjudicate here on this question, except perhaps to pass the comment that irrespective of Riefenstahl’s
explicitly stated views, it is scarcely credible that she could really believe that she had genuinely free
artistic choice. The view that her work was subordinated to a political purpose is, to say the least, plau-
sible. Further, although Riefenstahl is used here as a convenient example, nothing in the subsequent
argument concerning craft turns on the work of Riefenstahl herself.
Art, Magic and Propaganda in the Principles of Art 859

agree that in so far as it is merely craft, Riefenstahl’s work is aesthetically flawed.

But Kieran is making a stronger claim than this to the effect that because Nazism
cannot be faced honestly without revealing it in all its immorality the artist is nec-
essarily driven away from the production of genuinely valuable art.

Thus far, as we have seen, Collingwood deals with the issue by claiming that in
so far as a work of art is in fact a work of craft it should not be judged by purely
aesthetic criteria. He would agree with Kieran that Triumph of the Will was aes-
thetically flawed in so far as it failed to give an honest account of Nazism; but in
so far as this was simply due to its character as magic he would hold the aesthetic
judgement (whilst true) to be irrelevant – the work should simply be judged by the
standards of craft and not art. However, it is less clear what he could say about
Kieran’s assumption that an honest account of Nazism could not be both a work
of art and at the same time an endorsement of Nazism. Collingwood would, I be-
lieve, take the view that Nazism is necessarily a terribly difficult subject for any
artist to face honestly, simply because to do so requires facing up to the real and
genuine attractions it possessed. It is easier to say ‘Nazism is obviously wrong’
and turn one’s face away from its emotional seductiveness than to say ‘Nazism is
wrong, but I can see why it was so attractive because it appeals to something in
all of us’. To examine this further, we could perhaps ask the question of whether
it is possible to conceive of a sincere Nazi artist producing an honest imaginative
understanding of Nazism and hence a genuine work of art in a sense acceptable to
both Kieran and Collingwood? Kieran’s position seems to imply that this is im-
possible: either the work of art fails because the Nazi just cannot see it for what it
really is; or the Nazi, in seeing it for what it really is, ceases thereby to be a Nazi.
To be successful, the sincere Nazi artist would have to honestly feel and imagina-
tively construct something in which they firmly believed, but which to everyone
else was morally repellant. The moral polarities would have been reversed in that
where we saw bad, he saw good.

To make good his assumption Kieran would have to cite reasons why such a
moral position could never actually be sincerely held, and hence why a sincere
Nazi artist is cannot exist, and this would entail making good some large claims
about the nature of ethics. Suppose, on the other hand, that Kieran accepted that a
sincere Nazi artist was possible. If so, they would be able to produce an artwork
which constituted an authentic act of imaginative understanding on their part. It
would fully express their deepest convictions and hence would be considered by
them fully moral. It would shirk nothing and face everything; but it would system-
atically value everything differently. Here there is a dilemma. Either the immoral-
ity of the work of art makes it aesthetically worthless (which is to embrace ethi-
cism in its naive sense), or we accept that because it is a genuinely honest imag-
inative account, it is therefore aesthetically valuable. Kieran is impaled on the
horns of this dilemma. To admit the possibility of a sincere Nazi artist simultane-
ously reduces his position to ethicism in the naive sense and also drives a wedge
between the two things he wants to keep together, that is, an honest imaginative
understanding of the world and the honest treatment of an immoral subject matter.
Hence he has to presuppose that a sincere Nazi artist is impossible, which in turn
(as we have seen) commits him to addressing some very large questions in ethics.
860 James Connelly

Art and Politics in Collingwood

As we have seen, in Collingwood’s aesthetics there is an ethical element to the
effect that the goodness of a work of art is ultimately a sort of moral goodness
in the sense of attaining a truthful or uncorrupt consciousness. Thus he tends to
sidestep the question of whether or not explicit treatment of ethical or political is-
sues as such is a good or a bad thing. Clearly the promotion of a particular ethical
or moral standpoint is magic and hence, in Collingwood’s terms, pseudo-art. The
place he allows for politics to enter art qua art is at the prior level of the expression
of emotion.

‘It is clear, then, on my own premisses, that an artist with strong

political views and feelings will be to that extent better qualified to
produce works of art than one without. But the question is, what is he
to do with these political views and feelings? If the function of his art
is to express them, to make a clean breast of them, because unless he
can do this he cannot discover to himself or others what they are, he
will be turning them into art. But if he begins by knowing what they
are, and uses his art for the purpose of converting others to them, he
will not be feeding his art on his political emotions, he will be stifling
it beneath them. And by going on to stifle it harder and harder he will
not be getting nearer to being a good artist. He will be getting further
away. He may be doing good service to politics, but he will be doing
bad service to art.
There is only one condition on which a man can simultaneously
do good service to politics and to art. It is, that the work of explor-
ing and expressing one’s political emotions should be regarded as ser-
viceable to politics. If there is any kind of political order whose real-
ization involves the use of the muzzle, no one can serve that kind and
at the same kind serve art.’

Here there is a sort of convergence between Kieran and Collingwood. Although

the first part of Collingwood’s argument here clearly indicates that subordination
of art to political purposes will create bad art, irrespective of what the purposes
are, in the final section he seems to be arguing that some regimes value the genuine
expression of political and other emotions through the medium of art and some do
not. A good political order recognizes that art, properly and openly pursued, is
a necessity in human life and should therefore be encouraged, an encouragement
extending to art expressing political emotions. A regime requiring the subordina-
tion of art to political purposes, either positively (demanding art to serve as pro-
paganda) or negatively (censorship) destroys art in so doing. For Collingwood,
the condition of being able to serve both art and politics is to be true to oneself
artistically, and under a regime of this sort that would simply be impossible, at
least publicly. An artist shackled in their imaginative understanding by the prior
constraint of serving a particular political purpose cannot be fully honest.
Art under the Nazi regime is clearly shackled, both positively and negatively.
An artist wishing to present their work to the public (for Collingwood all artists
The Principles of Art, pp.279-80.
Art, Magic and Propaganda in the Principles of Art 861

ultimately need to present their work to the public) tend to face a simple dilemma:
publish and be condemned (or worse) or tailor one’s art to the prevailing ideology.
The latter can be done in different ways, of course: subversive art can be disguised
in various ways to render it (the artist hopes) invisible to the authorities, thereby
opening up ironic and satirical space to the artist. Another is to make one’s art
acceptable to (or at least, not unnaceptable to) the regime. But in this case is it
possible to retain any shred of artistic integrity? A question especially pointed if
the subject matter of the artist is Nazism itself. Nazism draws on emotions which
many of us would not wish to admit to as part of ourselves. Hence the desire to
disown those emotions or to bowdlerise or repress their expression would be over-
whelming. As argued above, the very nature of Nazism itself makes it difficult
for the artist to face it openly and honestly, and this difficulty is magnified by the
existence of a prior commitment to its glorification through the generation of a
work of magical propaganda. Thus, in the end, there is perhaps a convergence of
Collingwood’s and Kieran’s positions. Some subject matters are much harder than
others to deal with honestly, and the absence of honest dealing is the absence of art
proper. Hence Riefenstahl’s subordination of artistic motives to magical ones ex-
acerbated the difficulty already inherent in taking Nazism as artistic subject matter.
While what she produced might have some artistic merits it could never be great
art: great art can be produced on such a subject matter but only a great artist, un-
shackled by the urge to propagandise, free to explore and express all they thought
and felt about the matter, and fully equal to the task of facing up to those thoughts
and feelings, could possibly rise to this challenge and produce a great work of art.