Does Art Endure? Does Art Matter?

Terry Rodgers

"Monuments Men" reviewed in the New Yorker, suggests that even in war, even among men like Hitler and Goring, art  matters.  As busy as Hitler and company were organizing the capture and annihilation of Europe's Roma, homosexuals, dissident priests, and Jews, and as much as they became obsessed with bombing and  subjugating their Dutch, French, Polish and Russian neighbors, the movers of the Third Reich, still found time to systematically collect paintings and works of art for their own walls and for museums they planned as plunder for the glory of the Reich, which they projected would last 10,000 years.

Rodgers at Work

 It may seem remarkable that men who would organize the muddy concentration camps, who who reduce towns to rubble, would have a love of beauty as it appeared in the French impressionists.  Of course, Hitler and some of his crowd had wallowed in the trenches during World War I, in that particular squalor, and they used the language of "purification" quite a lot. They loved the blonde Aryan image, which, if nothing else, looks squeaky clean.  So, the eradication of the dark, "dirty" and the embrace of the clean "white" may have been part of the same psychopathology. It is perhaps no accident the famous cartoon, the Sunshine People, which showed little men who rode bumble bees into battle against the dark people, who dropped bottles of milk on the dark villages and transformed them into clean, joyful white creatures--that cartoon was made in Germany.  (Hitler's Luftwaffe did not drop milk bombs.)

Rodgers 

 It is often neglected that Hitler offered more than hate. He offered a vision of beauty, of how life could be "cleansed" and made wholesome and wonderful. Of course, his idea of doing this was to first kill a lot of people who did not meet his idea of beauty. But he was a painter and he had a strong idea of beauty. And he chose an architect, Albert Spear, to plan his beautiful new cities.

Obadiah Youngblood North Hampton NH 

 Some have commented that the master of the Third Reich in stealing art from France and, in particular from Jews, was striving to wipe off the evidence these folks had ever existed, because art survives death. It speaks to us from the grave. We can visit the Parthenon centuries later and here those Greek artists are still speaking to us. It makes us more than dust in the wind. Maybe that's why, as we get older, art seems to matter more than science. 
And it doesn't really matter whether that art is the odd, intriguing but often disturbing art of Terry Rodgers, the traditional art of Youngblood or the spectacular exuberance Van Gogh. Some is better than others, but it's all still coming from a creative urge, somewhere.

Van Gogh

For the Phantom, standing in front of a Van Gogh is thrilling, and the Phantom is aware that same thrill was felt by Van Gogh's contemporaries and will be felt by generations long after the Phantom is dust.

That same is true for music, as much or more. Listening to Beethoven, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, Bob Dylan, the Phantom knows that work will be thrilling listeners for as long as there are ears to hear it.

Does art matter? Only if our lives have any meaning in the vastness of the universe. 
God may have created the universe, but Van Gogh created that picture of the sower.