A list of artists considered crucial to Nazi culture was assembled in September 1944 by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The list exempted the designated artists from military mobilization. The names of Richard Strauss and Herbert von Karajan appeared on the list. The so called “God gifted list” can certainly be held up as a case of artists collaborating with a dictatorial system, showing that art is not always assigned a role as anti fascist or anti totalitarian.
History has provided us with sufficient evidence of that. In every authoritarian regime there is a group of loyal intellectuals. Nazism, for instance, developed aesthetics akin to its own interests, whereby art played a propagandistic role, rather than a political one. Officially approved art produced in Nazi Germany was to be comprehensible to the average man, to enlighten the public, to despise elitism and to be realistic
Article source: https://www.authintmail.com/article/art-culture/when-art-endorses-dictatorship