The artist's becoming the preferred role model of modern Europe is a perfectly understandable process, as we can see in him the embodiment of the idea of individuality and, ultimately, human dignity. However, detaching ourselves from the aura—thus also from the promise associated with this figure—we see a strange, even dark question emerging. What if this promise can't be kept, and what if we’re now confronting the figure of the failed artist? This is a thought that the American philosopher Eric Hoffer made, in the early 1950s, the core of his work The True Believer – in which he argues that totalitarianism, as it raged in its Nazi and Stalinist varieties, could first and foremost be counted as failed artists. And this is precisely the idea of artist Megan Gafford, who sees the disappearance of beauty—exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's urinal—as one of the great catastrophes of the last century. Because what art denies itself seeks refuge in political activism. Since Megan Gafford, who taught design and drawing at the University of Denver and has been teaching at the University of Boulder for more than a decade, has been able to observe this logic of mobilization at close range, she's emerged as a journalistic voice with this idea, writing for magazines such as Quillette, Areo, and Tilt West.
Megan Gafford is an artist who lives and teaches in New York. Her interest in science and technology drives her artwork's strange sense of uncanniness. In her studio practice, she repurposes unsettling scientific tools like radiation and cybernetics as art materials, to create work that commingles eeriness and elegance. She also has a Substack blog called Fashionably Late Takes.
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The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty. In Quillette
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