“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun” runs the oft-quoted line, usually attributed to Goering, Goebbels, or some other Nazi apparatchik. It symbolises a neat dichotomy between barbarism and culture, between art and weaponry, a sign that the brutes have no love of the finer things in life. When Frasier acquires a new painting, it is such an impulse he is appealing to. He regards the culture he consumes — tellingly, a European high culture of opera, painting and ballet — as something that indicates something intrinsically better about his character. It’s an old-fashioned model of connoisseurship, but one that still holds much sway among its fans and detractors alike. Culture makes you better, distinct from those who would sooner reach for their gun.
The problem, of course, is that culture is a gun. The line in question doesn’t come from a fascist politician, but from a play, Schlageter, written in 1933 by the expressionist poet and Nazi playwright, Hanns Johst. The play focuses on the true life of a Freikorps martyr, executed by the French military ten years earlier for sabotaging train lines in the occupied Rhineland. Playwrights like Johst, members of the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture), understood the powerful political role that culture has in building, maintaining, and, perhaps most importantly, spreading an ideological position. While the motivations of artists might be autonomous from the political sphere, it can never be autarkic — the act of art-making positions the artist into a world of meaning, a political world.
Frasier’s use of culture is as a political weapon of his own, albeit one with deep bourgeois roots rather than militant fascist desires for ‘revolt’ . The appeal of high culture is that it justifies his acquisition of wealth in a society where others merely survive, and confers upon him a degree of cultural capital, in turn part of a system that produces more, real capital. From the opera board to the wine club, both Frasier and Niles understand that their membership of a cultural elite is both a reward for, and perpetuator of, their social and economic condition. When a caller asks whether he should spend his family’s savings on a sump pump or a trip to Italy, as his wife prefers, he wastes no time in aligning himself not just with Europe, but with the culture of the High Renaissance, wistfully recalling “Ah — Italia — the rolling hills of Toscano, the art of Firenze, the passion that is Venezia…”
As a European, I find the place the role this vision of Europe plays for the US bourgeoisie curious, where it is so often wielded by both sides as a classist weapon. While Frasier over-identifies with its historical high culture to prove his intellectual worth above the guy with the sump pump, Martin mocks such pretensions as snobbery, maybe with a hint that such European snobbery is anti-American. Yet the obsession with ethnic roots in Europe by all classes of white America seems to hold onto the same idea, also deep inside settler-colonial ideology, that America is an extension of Europe, and its culture only finds significance in relation to its roots in various homelands — in Martin’s case, his Irish heritage.
For Frasier and Martin, escaping that heritage as a self-professed Anglophile is partly about escaping the working-class values of their father — perhaps fairly, considering the persistent abuse and humiliation that accompanied it for them as effeminate, precocious, and intelligent children. It’s for this reason that Frasier invests in a painting by celebrated Seattle artist Martha Paxton, bought from a high end gallery. The painting is bad — a sort of late, soft version of Abstract Expressionist works that peaked in popularity in the 1950s and ‘60s. Ironically, Abstract Expressionism itself was utilised as a powerful cultural weapon at the time, receiving funding from the CIA via its front organisation the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Producing a meaningful visual art culture that embraced the supposed values of ‘liberal democracy’ was intended to immunise Western Europe to the influence of Soviet cultural ideologies, but, more importantly, also communist literary and artistic movements emerging from Western Europe itself. Tom Braden, the first chief of the CIA’s covert ops unit the International Organizations Division, would later serve as the executive secretary of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, probably the most influential art museum in the world at the time, and a key site in the construction of American contemporary art as a weapon in the arsenal of capitalist democracy.
It’s amusing, given its historical role as a cheerleader for a supposedly classless, individual ideology of Americanism, that Abstract Expressionism has become a sort of cartoonish shorthand within US popular culture for classist European pretension, usually eliciting the refrain “my child could do that”.
That pretension is popped, for Frasier, when he invites the artist, Martha Paxton, to his home for a soiree, to show off his painting and, in turn, his cultural worth, to his high society friends. He praises her painting Elegy in Green, praising “the way you insinuate the palette but never lean on it” — only to be told that the painting is a forgery, by the artist herself, in front of his friends. Humiliated, his reaction is precisely to reach for his weapon — in this case, a brick, which he takes down to the gallery he bought it from. In the process, he adopts much of Martin’s attitude, the very thing he was using the painting to distance himself from, furious at the attitude of the dealer who won’t refund his money: “He’s sitting there right now with his brie and his wine and his little chuckle at my expense.” Like Martin, Frasier now believes that modern art is a scam, a joke at the expense of the little guy.
He’s prevented from smashing the gallery window by Niles, who thinks he’s gone mad. But when Frasier explains the humiliation to him in terms he understands — their shared childhood trauma of being mocked for being pretentious and intellectual — it triggers within Niles a similar furious reaction. All the things that they have used to distance themselves from that culture have, in the end, brought them back to the original trauma. Only violence can wipe clean the damage of culture — Niles throws the brick, a symbolic and cleansing redemption from trauma.
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.