NO WAR, NO ART? THE ECONOMY OF SUFFERING.
By Marie Greindl
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
It’s a damning verdict, if a little unfair to the Swiss (who, after all, did give us the Red Cross and Helvetica). But Orson Welles’ quip taps into an unnerving idea: is artistic greatness born from crisis? Do peace and stability doom us to a kind of cultural mediocrity? History, inconveniently, seems to side with the bloodshed. The Renaissance was not a harmonious flowering of genius but a battleground of warring city-states and politically ruthless pontiffs funding both art and assassination with equal enthusiasm. The Dutch Golden Age emerged from a brutal war of independence against Spain, its luminous Vermeers and Rembrandts painted against the backdrop of an economy drunk on colonial plunder. Weimar Berlin—sexually liberated, artistically electrified—burned brightly in defiance of its own impending ruin before being swallowed by Fascism. The list goes on. There is no need for a full chronology. (If you think I am being flippant, which I won’t deny, T.J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea is well worth a read.)
WAR MAKES BETTER ART. It is a highly seductive narrative and one as old as time. Achilles seeks glory in battle and Homer’s verses ensure that he is remembered. The same can be said for the Bible, perhaps most significantly in the Book of Exodus, where chaos, suffering, slavery, and liberation form the backdrop to both the construction of the Tabernacle and the Song of the Sea. War, catastrophe, and divine wrath often precede revelation, whether it is the poetic lamentations of Jeremiah or the apocalyptic visions of Revelation. But this idea is rooted in an allure to the poetic, the sublime, and the inevitable. It is not as much an aesthetic observation as a human compulsion. We are restless creatures, forever dissatisfied. Stasis is intolerable; we crave conflict, even when we have to invent it. It is the Freudian death drive, this impulse and self-sabotaging urge to stir trouble, to break what we build, to obliterate the sandcastle and reduce it to an unrecognisable heap of damp grains just to watch it crumble—just to hear the wretched sobs of a little girl nearby, her face contorting in tragic disbelief as if the entire concept of justice had been personally revoked. And if we are not at war with the world, we make war within ourselves.
Self-destruction is, paradoxically, an assertion of agency. The addict who drinks despite knowing it will ruin him, the gambler who bets everything on a losing hand, the artist who shreds his own work—they are all enacting a form of perverse autonomy. It is not just about suffering; it is about control, about refusing to be subsumed by order, about imposing rupture where none exists. Destruction becomes creation in its own right. The body, too, becomes a canvas for this urge. Self-harm, eating disorders, and acts of masochistic endurance reflect a desire to mark, to carve meaning into flesh, to overwrite the given form. The art world is littered with such impulses. Francis Bacon’s screaming, flayed figures embody the violence we turn inward. Egon Schiele’s distorted self-portraits, bodies twisted into grotesque contortions, are not mere representations but symptoms of this compulsion. Viennese Actionism takes it to its extreme with artists slashing their own skin, spilling blood in performative ecstasy, turning pain into spectacle. Slavoj Žižek sees this impulse not just as pathology but as freedom itself. A life purely dictated by survival—by self-preservation, by utilitarian pragmatism—is inhuman. To sabotage, to ruin, to desecrate is to assert one’s existence against the dead weight of inertia. The world, once orderly, is now chaos. And for what? For nothing. For the sheer, exhilarating pleasure of ruin.
But destruction elevates, horror of horrors, value. The lost, the damaged, the violently undone—these take on a glow of rarity that untouched objects can never possess. This romance of destruction, bound up with the glamour of artistic creation, fuels both mythology and market. It is not the artwork itself that holds value but the story of its making, its near-undoing, and entanglement with suffering, chaos, or defiance. Even war-torn canvases, slashed by accident or by intention, become fetishised objects. Lucio Fontana slits the canvas to destroy the image, and yet it is precisely this violence that collectors crave. Destruction, in the right hands, becomes a signature. A Fontana is a Fontana because it is cut. Philip Hook perhaps puts it fittingly when he admits:
The cruel retrospective verdict of today's art market is that most of these artists would have left more satisfactory imprints on the sands of artistic time had they died in the First World War than they did by surviving. To be callous about it, perhaps more of them should have been deployed in the front line of the trenches, literally an avant-garde. On the German side, two great Expressionists, August Macke and Franz Marc, were killed in action. Sad, of course, but in terms of ensuring a strong market for their consequently rare work, these last two may have got it right. In general, the younger an artist dies the better.
An artist’s death authenticates their work in a way that survival never can. Death is the ultimate act of verification. There will be no fall from grace, no dilution of style, no late-period mediocrity. To be cut short—violently, abruptly, mythically—is to be enshrined. Death imbues art with the scarcity and tragedy that the market rewards. The artist who lives too long risks becoming merely a producer, whereas the artist who dies young is sanctified as a phenomenon. The former manufactures, the latter is mythologised. This is the paradox of authenticity: it is not an inherent quality but a conferred one, assigned retrospectively by structures of authority—by the market, by institutions, by cultural memory (cf. my previous article on bad taste—if what we value is socially enforced, then bad taste might be the only authentic taste left. Though this still doesn’t justify collecting ceramic frogs).
The same is true of authenticity. We seek guarantees that something is ‘real’ because reality itself is unstable. The fear that someone might not be who they claim to be—whether an artist cashing in on their own style, a forger reproducing a masterpiece—has haunted human consciousness for centuries. In a world where replication is easier than ever, where the line between original and copy is thin at best, the appetite for a final, unassailable proof of authenticity only grows stronger. And what proof is stronger than destruction? What affirms an artist’s place in history more decisively than their own removal from it? Nothing.
This is why we love the idea that war makes better art, that suffering refines genius, that obliteration confers authenticity. Because destruction is irreversible—it cannot be faked, it cannot be undone. The market rewards this logic because it is unbreakable. Karl Popper argued that a theory which cannot be disproven is no theory at all. The same could be said of authenticity: if destruction always adds value, if a ruined or vanished work is always the most precious, then what would falsify this belief? The truth is, nothing would. Like any unfalsifiable claim, the idea is structured to always be true. If this belief were a testable theory, we would need to identify cases where destruction doesn’t increase value. But under this logic, no such cases seem to exist. If an artist dies young, their work becomes rare and valuable. If they live long and their work remains valuable, then longevity must not matter. If an artwork is destroyed, it becomes mythologised. If it survives, its continued existence proves its greatness. In other words, if an artwork survives intact, it will be authenticated by other means—provenance, connoisseurship, institutional backing. Every possible outcome reinforces the same idea.
No matter what happens, the idea always seems correct because people keep shifting the reasoning. This is exactly what Popper warns against—if you can never prove an idea wrong because every possible situation ‘proves’ it right, then it is not really a theory at all. It is just a belief people refuse to question. And yet, we cling to it. Not because it is true, but because it is satisfying. We want to believe that suffering sharpens genius, that loss enshrines legacy, that art is most profound when it emerges from catastrophe. It offers a clean, tragic symmetry—a way to make destruction feel purposeful, to give historical violence the illusion of aesthetic necessity. The real tragedy is not that we believe destruction creates value, but that we are so desperate for value, we keep manufacturing destruction. In the end, the market always wins. If destruction sells, it will be reproduced. If war makes art valuable, it will be curated. The myth is too profitable to die—it can only be resold. The only faint consolation (if it can be called that) is this: if suffering makes better art, then the world should be overflowing with masterpieces. And yet, somehow, it isn’t.
As Heraclitus said, “War is the father of all and the king of all.”