‘Degenerate Art’: For Some, Ugly Too Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Surely artists mirror not only their own souls but the soul of their society as well. The tortured and distorted images of these artists were often responses to a tortured and distorted culture.

Can any of us say we would not have their same sense of horror and outrage as we watched society’s morality and humanity coerced by an ineffectual and mendacious government, let alone by one gone insane?

But no, perhaps our own talent for denial has come to equal that of the German people 58 years ago. Yes, artists do present us with mirrors. But art is a two-way encounter: if you see something ugly, it is not the artist alone you see, it is yourself.

JUDITH CAMERON

Costa Mesa