Elective affinities

Andy Warhol and Leni Riefenstahl. Seemingly the hypothesis of an elective affinity between these two artists is bizarre. Once we search deeper the very adverse is revealed. I was having a discussion with a friend on the merits of Warhol and he claimed that Warhol's achievement was taking banal or ugly, even terrifying (electric chairs for example) objects and making them seem so beautiful that people actually wanted to hang them on their walls. That is the moment Leni Riefenstahl came to my mind: what was her greatest achievent but making the horrors of Nazism seem so beautiful that - if possible - people would be nailing them on their walls. This was only part of the phenomenon Walter Benjamin called aesthetization of politics, a most radical antidemocratic force. Leni Riefenstahl took the driving principle of Nazism - the elimination of all non-identical - and made and aesthetic principle of it: her films have perfect symmetry, rigid rhythm, nothing idiosyncratic or non-identical (like the Jew) is allowed to enter, the people are all so similar that it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other - all except for the führer, who is allowed his idiosyncrasy only because he encompasses the whole. Warhol took the driving principle of capitalism - the elimination of all non-identical - and made an aesthetic principle of it: his paintings aestheticize the workings of a mass society in which all is reduced to economic functions, in which all is tradeable, in which all is expendable and hence worthless. Just like Nazism, capiatlism had made humans only cogs in the mechanisms of the whole and just like Leni Rifenstahl Andy Warhol has functioned as an ideologue for this process.