Art Will Keep Us Alive?
"The world is changing....right before our eyes"
When people talk about The Culture War they mostly mean a political battle. They mean a kind of conservative Resistance battling the transformation that Woke Progressivism has wrought on our Western social norms and mores. But before the word Culture became politicised in this way, it used to mean Literature, Music, Art and Architecture and it is a culture war in this sense that is the main subject of this essay.
Whilst there are signs that the political tide may finally be turning, I have my doubts about quite where that ascendant right-wing populism will actually take us. But hope springs eternal doesn’t it and in the long term I invest more of my own hopes in Culture in the creative sense than in the Political. Will our Western creative energies transcend the political death spiral and keep the flame of Western civilisation burning? This essay is my attempt to read the runes - both political and artistic.
It is a subject I have been intending to write on for a while. This is partly because I try always to keep in mind that, however wrong-headed is the current Western liberal hive-mind, railing against it must never become the whole story. To awaken in a 2024 dawn may not be “sheer heaven” but life is still good....and Literature and Music (and maybe the visual arts too) are an important part of what makes it so. Also this subject was made topical recently by an essay- A Matter of Taste - in The American Mind that ‘went viral’ – particularly in the Rightist Substack ecosystem - sparking a large number of articles in response.
The essay (by TAM editor Spencer Klavan) puts forward the case that “the Right has a culture problem” and is itself, at least partly, to blame for a dearth of ‘right-wing art’. Why, he asks, is there so little on offer for that “beleaguered, and chronically underserved audience demographic- normal people”? His answer is that conservatives have become so inured to the relentless bien pensant version of what counts as culture and entertainment in the mainstream media that they have allowed their own “tastes” to atrophy. He argues that the cultural taste buds of “normal people” need to be re-sensitized.
“Why do.... the general public keep consuming, works of culture... that communicate a bottomless contempt for the religious practices, national ideals, and sexual mores that built the country?......There must be reasons, besides cunning Gramsci-esque counter-maneuvering, why efforts to launch a conservative artistic movement so often droop their way unto death....I can’t help but suspect that what we have here is a problem of taste.....Some of us need to be making art, that’s true. But far more of us need to be learning how to appreciate art.”
I was not particularly persuaded by the “what we need to do is” type discussion that the article generated. I am always slightly irritated by journalistic “we need to” rhetoric....because in reality there is no great mobilisable ‘we’. And especially not in our current hyper-individualist and socially atomised Western societies. I did however come across one article – tangentially relating to the Klavan piece - that did hit the mark for me:
What the Dissident Right needs is not a Dostoevsky-esque eight hundred page manuscript of depression and nihilism. If anyone wants that, they can just go read Dostoevsky..... What the Dissident Right desperately needs is to cultivate in itself is a spirit of joy and a zest for life. It is this energy that can bring about true change, not the moping and whining you see so often on Twitter. It is only in celebration of the good things—no matter how small they are—that you will find men willing to fight..... No one fights for a nihilistic cause that can offer only varying degrees of defeat.
“A spirit of joy and a zest for life”... this warning off of the dissident Right from allowing itself to disappear down a gloomy anti-wokeness rabbit hole is well said. It echoes something I wrote in one of my own essays: "a conversation with a Lefty colleague: “The trouble with you conservatives” he said “is that it’s all doom and gloom with you. You’re addicted to it.” and that “maybe he had a point”.
Hope Springs Political?
I often come across reviews on Substack, of books exploring the roots of the Wokeness malaise and what form a culture war against it might take. There seem to have been a rash of them recently. I read the reviews but I never the books themselves because, for me, nothing need be said about wokeness that cannot be said in a long essay. When I want book-length – when I want a big picture - I go for novels. More on that below.
From the reviews, I get the impression that the default view is to see Wokeness as something foisted on us by some or other kind of ‘Elite’ - ‘Techno Managerial ’ or ‘Cultural Marxist’. The implication being that the great mass of Western citizenry are basically sane, sensible folk who just need somehow to be politically liberated from this elite woke tyranny. This flatters the citizenry and sidesteps the awful truth that tens (hundreds?) of millions of them have in fact willingly bought into the progressive Left’s delusions. For this reason I do not see a convincing political ‘way forward’ in any of these tomes.
My own perspective is that Western liberalism has in fact spun out of control – and that conventional democratic politics can no longer alter its potentially cataclysmic trajectory. Yes, if the Wokeness disease had arisen entirely due to the 60 years of bogus ‘social justice’ virtue-signalling emanating from the Academia-Media Complex then maybe some political backlash could return us to a healthier version of Western liberalism. (Maybe the one that boomers like me remember....or is it romanticise?). But it seems increasingly clear to me that our cherished Western liberal idea of representative democracy: citizens vote; then elected government implements their majority wishes – was only ever possible in a particular historical moment. And that moment has now been overtaken by two unstoppable developments: one economic and the other technological:
Capitalist economic growth’s relentless, unstoppable expansion of bureaucracy
the internet’s ginormous expansion of both the supply and the consumption of both information and disinformation.
Representative democracy depended – amongst other things – on a degree of scarcity in the information/disinformation ecosystem. My (possibly old man’s) perspective is that our Western pluralist parliamentary settlement is now unravelling - that Le Deluge is fast approaching for Western liberalism as a political system. And après? We shall have to see.
Hope Springs Artistic?
My essay title is borrowed from the song Love will Keep Us Alive (by Capaldi, Carrack & Vale) made famous by The Eagles. (Regular readers will know that my essays often reference Rock lyrics). I suppose what I am really saying in this essay is that great Art will always endure. It is something that politics, however corrosive or philistine, cannot destroy. So in centuries to come*, after the ‘politics’ of our era has blurred into the mists of time, what will be remembered of us? What will be our equivalent of prehistoric cave art? (*always assuming, of course, that there will be centuries to come and that our technological wizardry has not had the unintended consequence of mass extinction).
Most on the conservative Right feel frustrated that it is – artistically speaking - virtually unrepresented in our 21st century culture. Certainly the Arts & Media establishment is 90+% Left. This is most regularly brought home to me in the murder mystery tv drama serials that my wife and I tend to relax to in the evening. The quality of the acting varies but the basics of the plot lines almost never do. The scripts follow a leftist virtue-signalling tick-box formula that I wrote about in this piece. (On the plus side, I am given to understand that this kind of tv viewing is, in any case, on the wane (more on that below).
A much more productive – less lazy - way of spending my evenings is in reading novels - both classic and contemporary. I always have at least one on the go and am constantly surprised at how plentiful is the supply of quality literary fiction even in Wokefied 2024. No doubt there are novels full of the same kind of race guilt-trip, LGTBXYZ and gender blah blah that is inescapable on the tv but I find no difficulty in avoiding them. Whilst I do not actively delve into the novelists’ politics, my sense is that most of the contemporary – and indeed classical – novelists I read are Progressive-leaning. But this does not prevent them from conceiving stories full of perception and wisdom about our human condition.
My other great love is music – again both classical and contemporary. Contrary to what some of my grumpier fellow boomers believe, The Music did not mysteriously die sometime in the middle of the 20th century. What did happen was that the (always) small amount of inspired music got engulfed in a tsunami of tat....as I wrote about here. It is however my instinct that the musical genre we call Rock has now mostly had its day – as indeed did previous musical genres - but I cannot bring myself to doubt that there will still be some kind of musical muse 100 years from now. And a perhaps tiny proportion of it will deserve to be called great art.
From a ‘Right-wing art’ point of view, most of the songs in my personal ‘greatest’ back-catalogue were - as with the novels - written and performed by politically Leftist artists. Many in fact whose political views I find somewhere on a scale from shallowness to infuriating cant. But - Klavan again: “Some songs are catchy whether you agree with their creators or not. Some songs are garbage even though you like the people who wrote them.”
Where our Western culture has been most seriously immiserated, by crass 20th century Progressivism is, in my view, in the field of the Visual Arts. The following observation by the great 18th century English critic William Hazlitt encapsulates for me the wrong turn that the visual arts took at the dawn of the 20th century: “Such persons are in fact besotted with words, and their brains are turned with the glittering, but empty and sterile phantoms of things…without any ground-work of feeling”.
In the far off days when my teenage intellectual/cultural sap began to rise (the mid ‘60s), it would never occur to educated people to question whether Picasso really was an artistic genius - any more than Rembrandt. Such was the total dominance of the Modernist mentality of that time. And so it is with both pleasure (and relief) that I have, in more recent times, come across critics brave enough to blaspheme - in articles all the way from The New Criterion to The New Yorker - that mid-century cognoscenti groupthink. You could almost call it a kind of progress!
Blaspheming, for example, the slavering adulation heaped on Picasso and his ilk: “ushering in decades of ugliness and assaults on the human form”. "The only way to construct a continuous narrative about Picasso is to accept the idea that art is a competitive sport and its meanings are a form of gossip.....Without the Continuing Saga of Pablo's Greatness, there's not much there. All you have to look at is his damn greatness". And as I wrote in an essay of my own, “nobody needs to be told that Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is a great work of art even if they didn’t know it was famous and valuable but how many would think that about Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon if they had somehow never seen – or even heard of - Cubism?”
The early to mid 20th century saw the pitching of the visual artistic muse ever deeper down what many (including myself) consider an aesthetic rabbit hole…. Abstract Art.
And in recent decades things have got almost laughably more vacuous and self-indulgent. When I started this essay, I had amassed enough material on ‘conceptual art’ to fill a book. The “pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat" that an idiot moneybags cognoscenti hangs on its walls "like a framed diploma from Smartypants U” Debunking it is like shooting fish in a barrel. But such negativity was not my purpose in this essay and so I have pruned the great majority of it away.
I did however come across one blog post by a young artist who’s agonised doubts gave expression to a profound truth about the nature of great art:
“One trembles to pose the question but: could it be that a great work of art can only emerge from a great amount of effort on the part of the artist? A Raphael, whatever else it is, clearly resulted from a great deal of effort; a symphony immensely so. Writing a novel – even a bad one – is a huge and exhausting creative undertaking. Recording a decent pop song, even, takes considerable effort.”
This is a common sense but profound truth that goes a long way to accounting for why it was particularly the visual arts that were vulnerable to Hazlitt’s gliitering empty sterility. And all is not lost because one needs dig no deeper than the long-running Sky Arts Painter of the Year tv series to be reassured that our culture is still generating artists who are putting in the effort needed to produce great paintings ....they’re just not the ones becoming billionaire’s playmates.
‘Right wing Art’?
Could it even be that the Left’s total and comprehensive hegemony is actually good for Right wing art? Young men in particular tend to be naturally rebellious against ‘parental’ authority – whether that be familial of societal. The point was made in this reaction to Klavan: “because we’ve been completely ghettoized and shunned from mainstream culture.....We don’t need to “try” to do anything... We should forget entirely about “moving the needle”..... Instead, we should embrace our status as outlaws”. Do artists in fact tend always to be outsiders? It has often struck me how much of great Western art was created by homosexuals. Was the wrestling with a sexuality considered shameful (and the consequent fear and feelings of ‘otherness’) actually a spur to their creativity? [If so, whether that will continue now that it is socially something to be ‘proud’ of, remains to be seen.]
One of the many ways in which the internet has been transformative has been its draining the attention of the young away from that soft-Left ‘legacy’ arts & media entertainment hegemony. We have now entered a more chaotic and uncontrollable information environment. According to Klavan “the world of young dissidents is a carnival of.... artistic experimentation. Like most artists, the impish Bohemians of what was once called the New Right are more instinctively creative than they are philosophically rigorous.” I personally am just too old to tune in to what young people are creating – for good and ill – in that chaotic, anarchic, TikToky, Instagramy environment. But my deep, 50 year immersion in Rock music tells me that – as with Rock – it is likely to be 99% trash and 1% pearls. In the long run – the very long run - it is those wonderful 1% pearls that will endure.
1. When much of the reason for the existence of modernist art is to shock the bourgeoisie, what do you do when the bourgeoisie are now basically shock-proof?
The average frustrated Yalie or Cambridge undergrad has seen transgressions that would horrify a de Sade or even the great whores of old.
2. Nostalgia is a refuge for those without power.
Many parts of this article resonated with my own observations and subsequent conclusions that it would be impossible to begin to address even 20% of the really, *really* important issues you raise here. I will limit myself to two, and be as brief as I can.
Art, in general, but let's stick with only non-linguistic media such as visual art and instrumental music, bypasses language to communicate an emotional, and subjective, non-verbal message. This message is almost always based in the emotion--although it might be argued that Escher visuals do not entirely fall into this category, but come closer to the visual impression of superbly crafted three dimensional objects--maybe even utilitarian objects, like an old Hasselblad camera or Campagnolo group set of the 70s.
If accurate, most art evokes an emotional response, is solely subjective, and hence is unifying only when the subjective response is similar among the majority of any social group. E.g., everyone thinks the same thing when viewing Goya's The Executions, but the same cannot be said for abstract art in general.
And instrumental music tends to be even more emotional and subjective. What do Satie's Gnossiennes *mean*, actually? I woke up to one of them and it really, really disoriented me for a while. They meant something to my subconscious, that's for sure, but would it be the same message to other listeners?
Too, such art is a one-way communication channel: the artist speaks, you listen, and s/he receives no direct response to the subject of his/her art. Critics and sales are an indirect response, but not really so much to the message conveyed by the piece.
Given that such art is emotional and subjective, is it any wonder that woke progressives, whom I'd characterize as unapologetically emotional and subjective, have greater facility for creating art the the contemporary Center-Right? And if that part is accurate, would it make sense to suppose that they'd create art that was more to the sensibilities of the Center-Right?
They're by nature just better at it, maybe, and thus it will always be...