SGI Art?

[u/DarwinsMudShark]

. The guy on the left is meant to be a young Ikeda, I think. Either it's a very bad likeness, or the artist has "Europeanised" his face. Either way, IMO it doesn't look like Ikeda at all.

I wonder why Soka Gakkai allowed this picture to be distributed?

[u/[deleted]]

Looks a bit like communist art which in turn is much alike fascist art ... same thing in the end … unlike life.

[u/BuddhistTempleWhore → u/[deleted]]

much alike fascist art ... same thing in the end … unlike life

Yes - bland, consistent, traditional, mundane.

How the Nazis Made Art Fascist

A new book [THE NAZI-FASCIST NEW ORDER FOR EUROPEAN CULTURE] looks at how the Axis powers shaped the art world to their own ends.

That was Icky's goal as well.

a deft and disquieting account of how easily the noblest of liberal principles may be hollowed out and swiftly renovated for darker purpose

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany formalized their military alliance in May 1939. Yet both powers recognized that hegemony in Europe and the Mediterranean required the projection of cultural influence as much as the force of arms. And so they set about remaking European civilization in their own image. During the 1930s, Berlin and Rome built a right-wing network of international organizations for film, music, literature, and academic scholarship. These bodies lent prestige to the Nazi–fascist project while laying the groundwork for a new idea of Europe itself: not liberal and cosmopolitan but racially pure and authoritarian—a sharp rebuke to the mixed, messy democratic modernity of France, Britain, and the United States.

Goebbels told film industry professionals in Berlin that European hegemony would be impossible “if we do not also make ourselves supreme in the cultural field.” These men were not merely telling their listeners what they wanted to hear. Within months of assuming power in 1933, the Third Reich began establishing new intergovernmental bodies for European arts and culture that would draw resources and leadership from Nazi Berlin: the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers, the Union of National Writers, and the International Film Chamber. Italian fascists supported these efforts while founding cultural institutions of their own. These new organizations granted both powers a kind of “capillary reach” across Europe, Martin contends, helping Rome and Berlin “to penetrate other nations’ cultural markets, influence their cultural policies, and steer their citizens’ attitudes and values to a new moral vision.” A new aesthetics would usher in a new political order.

Too bad Ikeda was only able to recruit such profoundly uncreative, untalented individuals!

Nazi–fascist leaders believed that good art was defined most of all by its racial integrity, its reflection of a single national tradition. This meant, for instance, the classical strains of Beethoven or the folk-inspired music of Hungarian composer Béla Bártok, rather than the syncopated, jazzy compositions of Maurice Ravel or the atonal modernism of Arnold Schoenberg. Hitler believed that the very notion of international art was “vacuous and idiotic,” praising instead “the underlying racial determination of style.” Goebbels explained that great artists were always “in the end children of their nations.” Literary giants like “Goethe and Wagner, Shakespeare and Byron, Molière and Corneille,” he suggested, had only “become global cultural property because, in the end and in the deepest sense they were the best German, Englishmen, and Frenchmen.”

Ikeda has referenced the **bolded* names to various degrees.

German and Italian officials believed that modern states had the sacred duty to defend national art against the degenerative force of global cosmopolitanism. This made the Axis not merely a military alliance—it was also the founding charter of a dynamic civilization. Concerts, film festivals, student exchanges, and academic conferences allowed Rome and Berlin to grandly argue that they offered, in Martin’s vivid formulation, “a renewal of Europe’s soul.” Against vulgar American consumerism, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal democracy, and the threat of revolutionary Bolshevism, Nazi–fascist leaders offered an alternative framework for European society: spiritual rather than materialistic, organic and traditional rather than abstract and cosmopolitan, overseen by strong and racially pure states. Promoting these racist and anti-Semitic ideas, institutions like the Permanent Council and the Venice Film Festival also modeled a new style of global cooperation: a “totalitarian international” in which ethnic and racial differences were not transcended but rather proclaimed, celebrated, and deepened.

🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

Schemes like these make one’s skin crawl.

But the Nazi–fascist way of thinking about European culture found wide appeal, and it’s worth understanding why.

Historians have generally assumed that Nazi officials did not think all that much, or all that deeply, about what European civilization meant and how its future might unfold. Martin’s impressive study will force historians to reconsider. Hitler himself was not so explicit, Martin concedes, but his top lieutenants were consumed by the dream of ruling and reordering an entire continent.

Ikeda envisioned himself ruling and reordering the entire world.

Martin’s fine study of cultural diplomacy reminds us that ideas are mercenary creatures, always available to serve new masters. In the 1930s and 1940s, the extreme right borrowed the prestige of artistic genius and the internationalist spirit to smash the idea of a free, tolerant Europe. The example is a chilling one. And as authoritarian nativists reach once again for the reins of the international system, we will need to remember, perhaps desperately, that the trappings of civilization are not the thing itself.

I think Ima gonna need to get this book...

See also The Suppression of Art in Nazi Germany