The art of quoting Adolf Edited transcript of Andrew Graham-dixon speaking to the Cambridge Union on the motion: ‘This house believes there is no such thing as good taste’

So, I’m going to be talking about taste in a deeper sense … To me, the question is really this: is there such a thing as a good way of being a human being, or a bad way of being a human being? … To me the best way of expressing this – because it’s the most obvious way, the easiest way of making you understand – is to ask whether there is such a thing as bad taste...

So let me tell you my great example of bad taste to explain why good taste exists and why it matters, really matters. Adolf Hitler. [Audience laughter] It’s actually not funny, but I’ll allow you to find it funny, briefly.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: what is it about? It’s about taste, the whole book is about taste, culture struggle through taste. [Begins caricature of Hitler] “My struggle – Adolf Hitler’s struggle – I was a watercolour painter, I was rejected, my German art, my purity, it was rejected, the romantic tradition of German art was rejected by this modern art, this modern horrible art that was promoted by the Jews, which was cubist, inspired by the art of the Negro, tribal art – yeurgh, how horrible is that. We must expunge this from our Deutschland, we are the pure Aryan people, our genetics must be pure, our art must be pure, our taste must be pure…”

[Back to normal voice] So what did Hitler do? In 1937, the most popular exhibition of modern art ever held was staged in Austria and Germany and seen by three million people. It was called Entartete Kunst, “Degenerate Art”. Hitler, and Goering and his other friends, removed from every German museum every single work of art that was cubist or abstract or surrealist; Hitler hated surrealism, the art of dreams and nightmares, designed – he thought – to make simple Germans go mad. And if you’re mad in Hitler’s Germany, you go to the camp … So you had a taste-choice.

[Hitler caricature] “You go for the blonde Aryan, which is your destiny, your single pure culture – or you choose the art of the Jew and the negro!”

[Back to normal voice] And when Hitler had finished doing those exhibitions, he made a cultural programme of extermination. The works of art in Entartete Kunst were destroyed. And what happened next? All of the groups that the art represented – the mentally ill, the homosexuals, the blacks, the Jews – were actually killed. So it began with art, it began with taste, and it ended with death: for real people, millions of real people.

So that is why there is such a thing as f---ing bad taste. And if there’s bad taste, then there has to be something else, and I can’t say what it is, but it’s for us to invent. And if you don’t believe in it, you don’t believe in humanity. That is why there is such a thing as good taste …