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“Crazy at any price!” read a sign above the modern art masterpieces at the Nazi-sponsored Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art,” in English) exhibition in Munich, Germany, in 1937. The fevered brainchild of art-obsessed Adolf Hitler, Entartete Kunst aimed at showing not only what “Jewish” and “Bolshevik” art looked like, but also arguing how the degeneracy of those artists and their work threatened the spiritual health of the German people, the “master race” Hitler believed would rule the world, with him as their leader. The Neue Galerie in New York City revisits that sad moment in modern art history with the exhibition Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, which runs through June 30, 2014. The exhibition gathers together many of the “crazy” works labeled as degenerate, holds them up against examples of the Hitler-approved German art, and takes us down the long, strange road that led up to that Munich show. The result is a sad, strange history that will leave you shaking your head at the past, but will also make you wonder if it could happen, again, here and now. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Sad, Strange History of 'Degenerate Art.'"

Perhaps the one unavoidable fact all museums must face is the reality of limited space. Who stays? Who goes? Most importantly, who makes those decisions? In Germany, these questions have taken on a whole new degree of importance. The Gemäldegalerie—home of Berlin’s most prestigious Old Masters’ collection, with works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, and others—faces a move to another, smaller location to make room for the expansion of the Neue Nationalgalerie, where masterpieces by some of the biggest names of 20^thcentury art will be displayed. Germans seem split between those who want their Rembrandt (shown above, in his 1630 etching Self-Portrait with a Cap, Openmouthed) right where he’s been and those who would like to see Germany finally to have a world-class modern art museum. As other museums and countries eventually face this same problem, we’ll all have to ask if the Old Masters should give way to the new ones? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Should the Old Masters Give Way to the New Ones?"


[Image: Rembrandt. Self-Portrait with a Cap, Openmouthed (detail), 1630.]