Fascism (Artistic Movement)

Fascism is a fundamentalist artistic movement originating in Italy in the 1920's that seeks to convince people of that which is demonstrably false. Similar to post-modernism, Fascism tries to blur the lines of reality. The purported works of Fascism are all completely fictitious and have no corresponding actuality. This is done by inventing vast domains of imaginary worlds with their own sets of axioms, paradigms, logic, and definitions of truth. The mechanisms of fabrication, deception, and distractions are time-honored hallmarks of the Paleo-Classical Fascist movement.

Fascist Philosophy

The purity of nonsense is the most important goal sought by the Fascist artist. Nonsense is presented through a framework known as "inverse truth conditioning" wherein one discards the observable truth through emotional rationalization and then through means of suggestion, believes the truths' inverse. It is a perpetuating artform that when successful, will modify the actual thought pattern of the participants who will see the world in a completely different light and change their lifestyle accordingly. During the process, the Fascist must keep the personal knowledge that the message is nonsense close at bay or else all the effort will be in nought. Fascists are not concerned with absurdism insomuch as the ability to convince that solely the absurd is within reason and only the false is true. In "Realities Rubicon: The Fascist Castle", Walter Lippmann noted that, "If you task to disuade a subscriber of Fascism, you ought come with a standing army."

Fascist Art

The first well recognized Fascist work was a blank canvas by Jean-Luc Pierre Dumont-Abridova which sold in 1921. With $4.00, Abridova successfully bribed the editor of Photoplay, Sir Charles K. Dingleblight, to describe his painting in the February, 1921, issue as, "My Word! A delightfully playful interaction. Complex splashes of bright hue and fine strokes of meaningful expression intricately layered in a multi-dimensional tapestry that will stop time itself. Truly, as if Renoir diligently and delectably recreated every nuance of Baudelaire through a masterpiece of light and color that has been somehow completely miraculously confined to a single piece of canvas. Nay, the technology of photographics would be an insult. Common decency demands more". Through skillful management, and masterful execution, Abridova promoted his "masterpiece" fabrication under psuedonyms and through fictitious organizations to obscure him as the source.

Abridova's famous exercise in fascist art

This was all achieved without ever revealing the painting itself. In August 1921, 6 months after the Photoplay article and a string of similar efforts, Sotheby's held a silent auction where the piece was draped in cloth and exalted in a glass display, not to be revealed until the auction had ended. Sotheby's Auction House in London was swarming with thousands of onlookers, who had camped out for days on New Bond Street, fanatical to just catch a glimpse of Abridova's "slice of heaven" before it would be securely locked in the hands of a private collector. As the auction commenced, "the most remarkably new work of all time" instigated a feverish bidding war. In a fit of hysterically unreasonable oneupmanship, William Randolf Hearst outbid the De Medici family of Florence to set a world record for the most amount paid for a work of art up to that time, $523.50. After the betting was settled (and Abridova safely hid, 14 hours away in Sicily listening in by telegraph), the mysterious shrouded layers of hemp cloth were slowly pulled away to unveil an empty canvas.

However, on that day, in that room, nobody saw an empty canvas. The audience, first gasping in delight, quickly jutted out of their chairs and initiated a rolling storm of thunderous applause. At that moment in time, the starry eye's of Pollyanna faced stiff competition. Articles of the time quote people as saying such things as, "If I could invent a new language of love, the script would be written by Abridova and this would be its greatest poem". The audience's imagination was solidly projected upon the empty canvas. They saw the light, they saw the expression, they saw everything that was supposed to be there but wasn't. Abridova successfully sold a blank canvas by fabricating what it could be and then letting people's imagination project onto the white unfathomable emptiness.