Nietzsche, Bizet, and Wagner—Illness, Health, and Race in the Nineteenth Century

“Sick” and “healthy” remain aesthetic categories in our contemporary evaluation of the aesthetic—especially music or at least Western popular music. In 2002, American rapper Eminem featured “sound bites from Congressional hearings and newscasts describing him as vulgar, degenerate, homophobic, antisocial, misogynistic and ‘noise and mind pollution.’ He did not disagree.” ¹ In today’s China some popular music is censored as “unhealthy.” It risks infecting the youth with the disease of “moral pollution.” ² Certainly it was Giorgio Vasari who first evoked this category within the frame of aesthetic evaluation in the Renaissance when, commenting about Jacopo dalla Quercia, he wrote that there are aesthetic forms that could “degenerate” over time.