May 18, 2003

HORSEFEATHERS PRIZE ESSAY

Our co-winner of the recent "Punish France" competition, Francis W. Poretto, graces our blog with his prize essay. His webblog site is: Palace of Reason and he can be reached by email at: curmudgeonemeritus@palaceofreason.com

Francis W. Poretto
May 18, 2003

        One of the enduring lessons of history is that widespread peace and contentment will not last. Peace, the absence of conflict among men or nations, requires near-universal acquiescence; a single sufficiently belligerent party can spoil things for everyone. Contentment, one's willingness to accept his current state of affairs, can be perturbed by many factors, simple envy not the least of them.

        In the Western world, the tendency has been for the arts to run counter-cyclically to political and economic trends. When we're doing well, our arts tend to try to prick us into outrage or spasms of conscience. When we're doing poorly, our arts tend to try to comfort us, either by emphasizing the good things we still enjoy or by providing vehicles for escape into imaginary realms. These generalizations are fraught with exceptions, but there can be little doubt that the writers, performers and artists who get the most publicity are those who set themselves in opposition to the nation's prevailing attitude toward itself and its undertakings. It makes the artist stand out; it's simply more newsworthy.

        Just now, with due allowance for the enduring anger and pain over Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001, America is doing really well. Our economy is recovering from its recent, severe blues. Our social cohesion is gaining strength. Our little spat with Islam-powered terrorism has been running heavily in our favor. Our executive administration, though it's made some mistakes by your Curmudgeon's judgment, has earned the respect and confidence of the electorate, and can look forward to a renewal of its term in 2004.

        So our arts community naturally finds itself nudged in the opposite direction.

        Many view this kind of automatic opposition as a manifestation of an enduring leftish political bent among artists. There's some validity to the idea. The arts all take aim at the emotions, and among emotion-oriented people, political liberalism, in the contemporary American sense, has a big edge over its competing positions. But if we look backward a few decades, we can find periods when political liberalism was in the saddle and the country appeared to be doing really well by it, but during which our most discussed and admired artists espoused conservative ideas.

        Today, the most important of all the ongoing threads in our national life is the anti-terrorism campaign and its corollary efforts in the Middle East. One major episode in that campaign, the recently concluded war to depose the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein over Iraq, has provoked a firestorm of opposition specifically from the arts community.

        Some expressions of this opposition have been scurrilous, outright defamations of the country and its political leadership. No one need be told of the Dixie Chicks incident in Britain. The denunciations of the war effort by such as Sean Penn and Janeanne Garofalo have been equally prominent, and entirely unapologetic in the aftermath, even as the monstrosities wrought by Saddam Hussein and his henchmen have come fully to light. Most absurd and insulting of all is the recent proclamation by Norman Mailer, once an admired novelist, that the whole campaign was merely a contrivance to boost the "white male ego."

        When these are coupled with similar recent expressions from similar figures, such as Cher's claim that electing George W. Bush to the presidency would be the death of individual rights, and Alec Baldwin's vow to leave the country should Bush be elected, it seems more justifiable than ever to believe that the members of the artistic / cultural elite are at odds with mainstream American society.

        Yet an arts community is inherently commensal with the broader culture atop which it rides. Artists subsist on the ability of their patrons to generate an overall profit, a surplus that can be put to discretionary purposes. Man can live without Art, and when times are sufficiently bleak he will do so. Artists know this.

        Three centuries and more ago, artists required wealthy patrons who would support them out of pure appreciation for their endeavors. There are survivals of this pattern in the worlds of painting and sculpture, but in the main the American arts community requires the goodwill of the American mass audience: the common man who buys books and music, attends movies and live theater, listens to the radio and watches television.

        That major difference from earlier cultures suggests that it's far from wise for artists to express contempt for the values, tastes, and opinions of the mass audience. Yet the phenomenon is pronounced and widespread. Indeed, at times these "dissidents of the arts" appear to be striving to offend the maximum number of people. Why?

        There doesn't appear to be a single explanation. But then, no society in history has ever made so much room for so many different arts, sub-arts, and styles of art. Why should a single thread bind them all, or all their practitioners?

        There is no single audience, even for some narrowly defined subcategory of an art form, whose members possess enough commonalities for their group behavior to be predicted. For example, the country music audience is internally fractionated to a degree that would baffle an observer not familiar with the sweep of the idiom. When Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks proclaimed herself "ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas," she was speaking to a non-American audience...but there are American audiences for some kinds of country music, for example the sorts popularized by Garrison Keillor and the late John Denver, that would have been about as receptive to her opinions.

        Alongside that, we must recognize that many artists, perhaps most, feel a duty to destroy our peace and contentment, to change our opinions, to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." This is not an easy thing to do without contradicting those opinions that prevail.

        A third identifiable factor is artists' sense of being under-appreciated by our commercial republic. For all the money and attention we lavish on the arts, most Americans consider them to be diversions, amusements, of secondary importance at best. The very support structure for broadcast entertainment, which could not survive without the river of advertising revenue that flows through it, continuously reminds directors, producers, and performers of this.

        The arts are frequently spoken of as a mirror of their sustaining culture. There is more truth in that statement than is generally appreciated, for a mirror reproduces what it reflects with left and right reversed. But a mirror is a passive object. It cannot change the face it reflects; it can only induce the owner to change it himself.

        It's difficult to assess the power the arts world might possess for changing the American opinion landscape. Probably, this too will depend upon what specific audience we examine. The arts that appeal mainly to adolescents and young adults have shown a great power to shape tastes and opinions in those segments of society, but it is unclear how long-lasting the effect is, outside the strictly aesthetic realm. The arts that appeal to adults in their thirties and beyond both appear to have far less capacity to shape opinion, and far less inclination to try. The audience whose responsiveness of opinion has been both rapid and dramatic has been that composed of artists themselves.

        This isn't necessarily important to anyone but those artists, of course, but it provides much food for thought about artists' groupthink tendencies. Any artist one might select would undoubtedly place originality and independence of vision near the top of his list of important qualities for an artist to possess. Yet as a group, they show a remarkable uniformity of opinion -- today, the overwhelming majority are politically on the left -- and a baffling readiness to be dominated by the loudest and most charismatic among them, all the way to the extent of rejecting factual evidence if it runs counter to what their opinion leaders have told them.

        One effect of this is the development of a widening cleavage between the arts community and mainstream America, a gulf that daily becomes harder for either side to bridge. When a major figure in journalism can publicly say, "I can't understand how Nixon could have won. No one I know voted for him" (Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, 1972) and be echoed by a major film critic twelve years later ("I can't believe Reagan beat Mondale. No one I know voted for him," Pauline Kael, 1984), without any sense for the irony of the thing, it delineates that gulf in striking fashion.

        Nothing about our society is proof against all inducements to change. What peace and contentment we can amass will inevitably yield before some new aggressor or some desire unimaginable to us today. Yet it should be some comfort to reflect that, with few exceptions, the would-be disturbers of our opinions who are closest to us have succeeded far better at marginalizing themselves than they have at making us doubt our convictions or repent our allegiance to the experiment in freedom that makes them possible.

Your Curmudgeon is deeply indebted to Dr. Stephen Rittenberg, co-proprietor of the excellent www.doctor-horsefeathers.com Weblog, for suggesting this topic and providing some of the seed ideas for it.