Aging & Wisdom Quote by George Grosz

Grosz spits this line like a cigarette butt onto the polished shoes of his era’s tastemakers. Calling it an "old ploy" frames bourgeois culture not as a stable tradition but as a recurring con: when the social order starts to wobble, the ruling class doesn’t just send in police and laws; it sends in museums, critics, and a carefully curated idea of "art" to launder legitimacy. The scare quotes do the heavy lifting. "Art" here isn’t painting or poetry as lived risk. It’s a standing army of prestige - institutions, canon-makers, and respectable aesthetics - mobilized to make inequality look like refinement.

The phrase "defend their collapsing culture" is a double insult. First, it assumes collapse is real, not a melodramatic fear. Second, it suggests the bourgeoisie knows it, even if it won’t admit it. Grosz is describing culture as a battlefield where taste becomes propaganda. When a society can’t justify itself ethically, it tries to justify itself aesthetically.

Context matters: Grosz comes out of Weimar Germany, where inflation, street violence, and political extremism made "normalcy" feel like theater. His own savage caricatures of officers, clergy, and profiteers weren’t merely stylistic; they were accusatory. So the intent isn’t to dismiss art, but to expose how "high culture" gets weaponized as a firewall against social reckoning - a respectable mask worn at the moment the face underneath is cracking.