Aesthetic Practices of the New Right – Fake and Post-Truth as a challenge for transgressive art and cultural practices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21243/mi-02-20-14Keywords:
Aesthetic Practices, Post-Truth, New Right, Subversion, Fake, Critical Art, TransgressionAbstract
New concepts of authoritarian (affective) populisms and right-wing extremisms challenge democratic politics within their strategic critiques of so called multiculturalism, modern cosmopolitanism and democratic liberalism; hence the politics of the New Right use aesthetic practices in an attempt to resonate within subcultures but also to reach the cultural mainstream and broader publics (see digital culture wars). The fusion of right-wing (post-truth) politics, subversive tactics and popular cultures is already in progress. Therefore the essay analyses on the one hand non-conforming and transgressive aesthetics within the context of New Right movements active in Europe (example: the Identitarians) and traces their histories (example: Casa Pound). On the other hand it discusses artistic positions that employ methods like subversive affirmation and over-identification and analyses more thoroughly the Viennese feminist group Burschenschaft Hysteria. Considering the popular and/or transgressive aesthetic practices of the New Right (and the Alt-Right) we can critically review artistic and cultural practices, which use appropriation, mimicking, fakes and over-identification as methods to distort sociopolitical phenomena. What are the current (political) possibilities of mimetic and transgressive art/cultural practices? How to avoid post-ironic confinements, nihilistic reactionary trends and the risk of becoming immune or getting neutralized? In what extend those art/cultural practices can advance their cause of complexity and ambivalence so as to go beyond simplistic relativism, post-ironic confinements and nihilistic reactionary trends?
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