Who Is Affected by the Destruction of Art in War Zones

By Dawn Brancati

• Art is used to promote war. Monarchs, dictators, and elected earth leaders have all deputed artists to create propaganda to generate pop support for wars and to urge the public to brand material sacrifices needed to sustain wars.

In their work, these artists have depicted the opposing side as aggressive, powerful, and roughshod in order to stimulate animosity and fearfulness for the opposing side.  To evoke a sense of nationalism and pride amongst compatriots, they have depicted battlefield victories, and to stress the demand for continued support, they have portrayed the toll of war on soldiers and citizens.

Although, in general, propaganda art is not technically strong or stylistically innovative, some well-known artists, such as Norman Rockwell, take produced wartime art propaganda.

• Art is used to oppose war. But as governments have commissioned artists to generate support for wars, anti-war organizations have deputed artists to undermine sympathy for wars and undercut material back up for them.  Of course, many artists have also independently produced fine art to arouse for peace.

In their work, these artists take stressed the need to end wars by depicting their brutality, and have tried to generate empathy for their opponents by showing the suffering their opponents experienced at their countries' hands.  They have also used satire to mock the impotency and values of their countries' leaders.

Unlike fine art propaganda, anti-state of war art has historically had artistic value.  Well-known artists who have produced important works of fine art against wars include painters Pablo Picasso and Francisco Goya, photographer Marc Riboud, and muralist Banksy.

• Fine art, or rather the destruction of art, is used to demoralize opponents during war.Important works of fine art and architecture have non only been unintentionally destroyed in the course of wars, only they accept also been purposely destroyed by combatants as a military strategy to dispirit opponents and invigorate support among adherents by demonstrating the combatants' strength and resolve.  Combatants take also blamed their opponents, falsely at times, for works of art and compages destroyed in conflicts to demonstrate the affront that their opponents present to their history, values and civilisation.

Important sites that have been recently destroyed as a wartime strategy include the G al-Nuri Mosque and the Baalshamin and Bel temples in Palmyra, Syria.

• Art is looted in the course of war. Looted fine art has as well been used to finance wars. It is impossible to precisely determine the amount of money that ISIS has fabricated from looted art, but Russian federation has estimated that ISIS nets between $150-200 meg per twelvemonth in the illegal antiquities merchandise.  Looted art has also been used to reward military and political leaders and too has been seized by these leaders to reward themselves.

To prevent stolen fine art from beingness used to finance wars, museums and other cultural institutions have offered to house art at risk of being looted until it tin can be safely returned to the original countries. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, international organizations, including the United nations and the European union, every bit well every bit private countries, such equally Canada and the United States, accept banned the importation of art and antiquities from countries aggress by conflicts.  Unfortunately, however, these bans are hands subverted and protocols, like those used to certify diamonds equally conflict-free under the Kimberley Process, do not be for art and antiquities.

• Art is used to recover from war. After wars accept concluded, art has too been used to raise funds for soldiers injured in the class of wars and to provide relief to refugees displaced from them.  Art has too been used as office of DDR strategies to provide employment for former combatants and to rehabilitate erstwhile combatants emotionally.  Artists have fifty-fifty used the weapons of war to manufacture art.  Examples of programs defended to turning arms into art include the Transforming Arms into  Plowshares project and the Peace of Fine art project, established by Neil Wilford  and Sasha Constable,  the neat-dandy-great-granddaughter of mural painter John Constable.

Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Dr. Jennifer Farrel, Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for sharing her insights on WWI propaganda posters.

Related Tags

• art
• Propaganda
• War

Dawn Brancati (Columbia PhD) is the writer of ii books, Peace by Pattern: Managing Intrastate Conflict through Decentralization and Republic Protests: Origins, Features and Significance, and has published widely in leading academic and policy journals. Her research focuses on the human relationship between democratic institutions and intrastate violence and has been recognized with awards, fellowships, and grants from various institutions, including the American Political Science Association, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, German Marshall Fund, Harvard-MIT Data Center, and National Science Foundation. She has taught at Harvard University, Washington Academy in St. Louis, and now Columbia University.

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Source: https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2018/01/05/five-ways-art-and-war-are-related/

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