Attitudes and Aspirations regarding Political Art
There is much frustration vented, and much ink spilled, over the increasing politicization of art and the deleterious effect it has on our culture. Where once an active and thoughtful community of artists gathered in appreciation of the fruits of their labor and craft – such as the Grammy’s once were –, now our artists shill out slogans for the latest political trend, or help campaign for the next hopeful to grow old in office.
However, this controversy is a perfect opportunity to reflect upon the artist’s relationship with his or her brainchild. Like any good parent, we have to ask ourselves the questions, “What do I want my children to become? What shall they emulate?”
Art is the progeny of man and the human experience, and because man is a social animal that desires order, he enters into politics. Our art, therefore, should not be faulted for its connection to political ponderings.
Some of the greatest poets and painters across time and space wrestled with religious, moral and political questions within their art. The presence of politics in art is not itself the evil we cry against, for something else assails our conscience beneath the blanket of the ‘political.’
It is my view that a politician should be a poet, even a bad one, but that our poets should not strive to be politicians. By this, I mean that those who practice politics ought to have the pursuit of beauty, order and those high ideals at the forefront of their thoughts.
They should meditate upon them, breathe them into verse, immerse them in ink or paint and call them forth on canvas. They should not, as the poet-turned-politician, use language appropriate to these things for political gain and the accumulation of power.
The poet, who may tend to overexaggerate in his verse, might become too bombastic in his campaigns, and trade the truth for a trusty piece of rhetoric to further his goals. The painter, who catches our attention in bright colors, might trade his pigments for more galling material, and use the community for his canvas, in order to prove his power.
Our notion that art shouldn’t make points derives from the aesthetic movements in the late Victorian period, and from the idea that art should be amoral, for art’s sake. What we got was art with bad morals and worse artists.
Because our secular, tolerant culture has traded religion as its foundation for politics, it becomes rather obvious why art and artists have turned towards politics. The topics that matter – man’s relationship with God, and how he should treat fellow men – won’t tolerate discussion because no matter what all answers are tolerated.
That leaves man’s place in a society, and the laws governing it, to be decided. Without an ethical basis on which to found a political philosophy, we will be left groping, blind in the black, for anything that might work.
For our art to be political but not pandering, for it to make a point without pointing at us, we need a guiding light from which we can guide our artistic voyages. Without that light, with it obscured under a bushel basket, all that remains is for the whole house to burn, while we wonder where we put the fire extinguisher.