Kate Wagner:
Let’s begin by saying that all fascist aesthetics are:
• Anti-intellectual. Superficially, the fascist is anti-intellectual in order to maintain his Volkish bona fides. This is true even while he is posing as the opposite, as a kind of benevolent sophisticate; JD Vance, an obvious member of the Yale set who publicly disavows “elites” and ostentatiously poses as a man of the people (via an immutable quality granted to him at birth by way of his “Hillbilly” upbringing) is actually a pretty good example of this dynamic. We see the same impulse in the Traditional Architecture space where, while the beauty and superiority of classicism are heralded over modernism, specific arguments are lacking as to the rather contentious history of developments within classical and neoclassical architecture, because that would mean acknowledging that questions of beauty aren’t so cut and dried.
• Vampiristic. Fascists rarely make art. Instead, the fascist aesthete’s job is to appropriate existing art for the purpose of aestheticizing a political goal. Because fascism relies on the fetishization of the past—whether real or imaginary—nothing truly new can come from fascist art.
• Violent. Dehumanization, augmented by technological abstraction—the sublimation of man into machine—creates under fascism an extreme predilection for violence. In Italian Fascism, this role was played by the automobile, as evidenced by the fascination of Futurist artists like Marinetti with car crashes. (Today, AI deepfakes play a similar role.) Fascist aesthetics are ruthlessly hierarchical and their satisfaction is derived from the maintenance of that hierarchy. They are antisocial and rely on shock value.
• Misogynistic. Fascists hate women, and I would argue that the aesthetics of fascism today are even more misogynistic than those of the 20th century. The obsession with dominating women, controlling their bodies and eradicating them from public life; the myth of the nurturing mother of the master race, and of the youthful body that must live forever, and its confusion with beauty—all of this is consistent across fascisms. The fundamental affect of today’s fascist aesthetics is one of libidinal resentment.
• Technologized. The fantasy of replacing the human with the machine, and with using technology to violent and ruinous ends was a huge part of fascist aesthetics and thinking in the 1940s, especially in Italy. The human drive to create was seen, then as now, as a feminine imperative, whereas the drive to invent, proliferate, and dominate is masculinized. Anti-human art is also pro-technology.