13. More Degenerate Art, Please! w/ Sarah Jaffray

Episode 13: More Degenerate Art, Please Host: Matthew Remski Guest: Sarah Jaffray [00:00:01] Matthew Remski What do fascists do when they see strange images and bright colors—and discover confusing feelings within themselves? They call the Degenerate Art Police. Hey everybody, I’m Matthew Remski. That was an antifascist dad joke. Welcome to Episode 13, More Degenerate Art, Please, with Sarah Jaffray. [00:00:28] Sarah Jaffray But in the age of Trump, I think transgressive art is empathetic. It’s transgressive to be empathetic now—to get people to see through your eyes, to experience the world through your individual voice, to slow people down, to get them to think. Art doesn’t always succeed at that, but it can make people pause. And I think it’s really important for us to remember that art takes time. The more our time with art is sped up, the more we’re being discouraged from thinking critically. [00:01:12] Matthew Remski But first—housekeeping. Jordan Peterson You know, I don’t know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can’t keep your room organized. Matthew Remski You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and on YouTube as Antifascist Dad. I’m also on TikTok under the same handle, where I try to post three to four mini-essays a week. My Patreon is AntifascistDadPodcast, where subscribers get early access to every Part Two of these main-feed episodes, plus additional content. And in the show notes you’ll find a preorder link for the book this podcast is based on, Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. Publication date: April 26, 2026—this very year. Happy New Year. In antifascist news of the week, and in keeping with today’s theme, I want to briefly highlight photographer Christopher Anderson’s recent Vanity Fair portraits of White House figures. If you haven’t seen them, I’ll link to them in the show notes. They’re incredible. What’s so powerful about Anderson’s series is that he describes himself not as an antifascist, but as a professional noticer. He doesn’t use ideology or argument. He simply frames Trump’s cabinet members as they are: anxious, alienated, isolated, awkward. J.D. Vance is backed against a wall, slightly off-center. Susie Wiles stands beside what feels like an infinite regress of darkened rooms, a ghost hovering far in the distance. Marco Rubio appears like a depressed Christopher Robin gazing down at Pooh—except Pooh is a glowing orange table lamp unmistakably echoing his boss. Carolyn Leavitt attempts a full-body power pose, but Anderson follows it with an uncomfortably close facial portrait that reveals how little respect her makeup team seems to have for her—filler injection marks left uncovered. One of the most striking things Anderson does is strip gender performance from his subjects. Amid the misogyny of Trump’s world—especially during this wave of Epstein revelations—many feminist writers have analyzed the so-called Mar-a-Lago look adopted by women near the center of power. Anderson refuses all of it. His images degender everyone. Stephen Miller is photographed in deep shadow, his cheeks hollowed, evoking Joseph Goebbels. Behind him hangs an 1870s painting, Indian Encampment on the Platte River by Thomas Worthington Whittredge, depicting Indigenous people calmly crossing a river toward their village—non-threatening, ordinary, human. Placing the architect of racist deportation policy in front of that image is devastating. At one point, Miller tells Anderson, “You have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” Anderson replies, “Yeah—you do too.” As my guest will explain, image control is everything to fascists, because they can feel how brittle their world really is. Sarah Jaffray is an art historian, educator, curator, and writer focused on modern art, philosophy, politics, and artistic process. She currently heads the art history program at City Lit and previously worked as lead educator for the Bridget Riley Art Foundation and in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. She’s also worked at the Wellcome Collection, exploring connections between art, medicine, and human experience. Here’s our conversation. [00:08:11] Matthew Remski Hello, Sarah. Welcome to Antifascist Dad. [00:08:13] Sarah Jaffray Hi Matthew. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. [00:08:32] Matthew Remski What makes art politically impactful—or transgressive—in the era of Trump? [00:08:38] Sarah Jaffray I often tell my students that all art is political, regardless of when it’s made. Artists make the invisible visible. That power has historically been wielded by institutions and patrons—but from the nineteenth century onward, as patronage declined, art increasingly became a direct political voice. In the age of Trump, transgression is empathy. It’s getting people to see through your eyes, to experience the world through your voice, to slow people down, to make them pause. Art takes time. When that time is taken away, critical thinking disappears. Art is also witness. It’s testimony to what it felt like to live in a particular place and time. That’s why it gets censored. It’s biased—because it’s human. And that bias is valuable. [00:11:04] Matthew Remski So if artists make the invisible visible, and transgressive art today is empathetic, then it sounds like empathy itself has become hard to see. [00:11:21] Sarah Jaffray It has. Empathy is a muscle—you have to practice it. When you glance at a work of art just long enough to photograph it, you don’t enter into a conversation with it. We’re encouraged to consume images quickly, but that speed denies us access to empathy. Artists aren’t required to make what we want. They need to express what’s inside themselves. It’s the viewer’s responsibility to take the time—but we’re rarely given that time. I think a lot about time. The time we’re denied to explore empathy. Artists are always showing us what it’s like to inhabit their skin. That could mean serving a king, or it could mean someone like Rothko metaphorically ripping his own skin off so we can be inside his body with him. There’s no single correct empathy. It takes imagination and patience. [00:12:52] Matthew Remski You’ve mentioned time and patience repeatedly. So let me ask this: what makes art politically impactful today—and why isn’t it made with AI? [00:13:07] Sarah Jaffray AI is a shortcut. I’m not anti-AI in every context—it has uses. But replacing human expression with it makes no sense to me. Art isn’t simply transferring an idea from your head onto a surface. It’s process. It’s experimentation, trial and error. You learn through making. Bridget Riley talks about having an eye at the end of her pencil—she doesn’t know what she’s making until she begins. AI eliminates that uncertainty. It also steals from other artists. The shortcut is appealing because people are under pressure and short on time, but it removes learning, play, and discovery. [00:14:48] Matthew Remski There’s also something outcome-driven about prompting AI. You delete what doesn’t work. You don’t learn anything about process. [00:15:24] Sarah Jaffray Exactly. We live in an outcome-oriented society—just get there. That’s contrary to every meaningful artwork ever made, whether it’s music, books, or films. AI reduces art to a product rather than an exploration. I often tell my students: you don’t read the first two lines of a novel and say, “I got it.” You spend time with it. AI images are immediately legible. That removes empathy, critical thinking, and the artist’s thinking. To me, it’s empty. [00:16:36] Matthew Remski My high-school writing teacher once told me: “If your writing doesn’t surprise you, you’ve become a parody of yourself.” That idea still haunts me. [00:17:50] Sarah Jaffray Yes. Bridget Riley calls this not knowing. If you already know the outcome, why make it? Surprise is essential—even artists serving kings needed novelty to sustain their own engagement. [00:18:34] Matthew Remski Let’s talk about the uncanny valley. What’s the difference between an artist intentionally creating that feeling and a bot doing it accidentally? [00:19:42] Sarah Jaffray Intent. Artists like the Surrealists—or even Hans Holbein—used strangeness deliberately to make viewers look longer. AI produces uncanniness accidentally by remixing images we’ve already absorbed. Holbein, Velázquez—many artists used disorientation to hold attention. [00:22:05] Matthew Remski I’ve had that experience with Rothko—and with Escher. Different routes to disorientation. [00:22:22] Sarah Jaffray Exactly. Art is about disorientation. That’s how artists make you stay. Abstract art refuses to spoon-feed narrative. It forces you to ask why you feel unsettled—and that takes time. [00:22:51] Matthew Remski Can you walk us through the shift from optical realism to abstraction, especially after World War I? [00:23:13] Sarah Jaffray The Industrial Revolution eliminated artisanship. Then optics, psychology, and perception reshaped how artists understood seeing. World War I was the watershed. Artists saw slaughter firsthand. Art had been a tool of church and state, and they rejected that role. They abandoned narrative realism and experimented with garbage, toilets, bodies, poetry, performance—anything not useful to power. Art became process, not product. This also led to art therapy as a way to work through trauma. [00:26:14] Matthew Remski That sounds explicitly antifascist. [00:26:55] Sarah Jaffray It was explicit. That’s why we have manifestos. Dadaism and Surrealism openly sought to dismantle institutional power. In Germany, New Objectivity framed subjective witness as truth. [00:28:15] Matthew Remski And these movements became targets of the Nazis’ degenerate art campaign. [00:30:48] Sarah Jaffray Yes. The Degenerate Art Exhibition was paired with the Great German Art show. More people attended the degenerate show—it was more interesting. Hitler attacked artists for making work “for themselves.” Otto Dix and George Grosz were hated most because they showed disabled soldiers, sexual autonomy, and the reality of war. One of Dix’s most popular paintings toured Germany in 1926 and was later destroyed by the Nazis. [00:33:07] Matthew Remski That’s the show for today. In Part Two—now up on Patreon—Sarah and I continue discussing fascist and antifascist art, and she shares the guidelines she gives her students for finding aesthetic freedom. I close with a short coda on what I’ve learned over 35 years of writing. We’ll see you there—or back here next week. Take care of each other.