Transgression trends:
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The artist formerly known as Kanye West is singing “Heil Hitler” onstage, and launching a “Heil Symphony,” and telling his haters to suck it;
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The artistic Right is reviving Italian fascist art, launching its own version of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Regency of Carnaro. Last week in Chelsea, New York, these would-be provocateurs hosted a launch party for the new Fiume Gallery (devoted both to the “avant-garde and forbidden” and a “new rising class of artists for the regime ahead”). The event included a “strut of the Valkyries” (burlesque) and a “Theatre of Cruelty”;
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In the post-Woke era, in both its mildly masculinist and more full-throated MAGA form, transgression seems an easy shorthand for self-identification: sexy, dangerous artists defining themselves against the sclerotic scolds of liberal bureaucracy.
There are plenty of trite things I could say about this. For example: Woke is dead; fascism is sexy; sexy fascism is passé; people who still write explainers for Yahoo News call “Heil Hitler” problematic; singing “Heil Hitler” onstage is many things, and problematic seems a nebulous but not inaccurate term to describe some of them; it is rare if not impossible to be dedicated both to the “avant-garde” and to a “regime”; even the Regency of Carnaro only lasted eighteen months, and everybody got syphilis.
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