The MAGA Theory of Art

There is a fable that persists in even themost respectable quarters, perhaps because it has retained its power to shock for more than half a century. Get any card-carrying liberal into a sufficiently confessional mood and she will tell you, sotto voce, that there was one domain in which the Nazis were perversely and chillingly formidable: the domain of the aesthetic. Even the Nazis’ detractors hailed their movies as sensations. Most famously, Susan Sontag noted in her landmark essay &