As an artist I have had the strongest emotional reaction to this story coming out of Washington. It begins with an article by Patrick Courrielche in Reason a few weeks ago in which he wrote:
Throughout modern history, art typically enters politics on a mass scale in two fashions: first, as a check on power; second, as a tool used by those in power. Freedom of the Press comes into play in both cases, but in very different ways. In the first case, it protects political commentary by artists. This freedom is not a garnish. It is a necessary weapon, enshrined in the Constitution for the purpose of countering contradictions, hypocrisies, and distortions made by politicians and others in power. Yet the art community has responded to the Obama administration's contradictions, hypocrisies, and distortions with near total silence.
Courrielche was leading into a discussion of the infamous Obama Joker Poster and he concluded with this:
It's time for the art community to return to its historical role in political affairs, which means speaking to power, not on behalf of it. Which leads me to the second case where art enters politics on a mass scale. The power of art, in combination with the suppression of free speech or a free press, has been used as a tool by authoritarian governments to control their citizens. From Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, art has been used to deify leaders while preserving the position of the ruling class. Most artists would not want to be referred to as tools of the state, but in the case of Obama's administration, that's exactly what they've been so far.
And then as if to prove his proposition, within days after this article was written Courrielche was invited "to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries 'to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda - health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.' " He writes about it here.He concludes his recap of the NEA call with this:
...[I]f you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. “This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely… “
I am not so sure that I agree with the proposition that the historical role of art is "speaking to power, not on behalf of it", at least outside of this country. Actually, I think the only "role" of the fine artist is to make something beautiful. I was reminded of "The Triumph of Modernism", by Hilton Kramer in which he includes a chapter about Kasimer Malevich, the Russian painter who emerged around the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Of Malevich Kramer writes, "...[He] was the very archetype of the avant-garde artist in the age of revolution. Embracing without qualm or limit every extreme of belief and aspiration offered up by the tumultuous era in which he pursued his radical ideals, Malevich looked upon art as at once an absolute and an instrument -- as pure spirit, on the one hand, and as a means of imposing a new social order, on the other."
I have no idea how many "true believers" there are among America's "art community" although it cannot be gainsaid that artists overwhelmingly seem to cant left, a contradiction that has always amused me. My amusement is derived from the realization that the statist regime to which the artist offers his allegiance (as the font of all substantial support of the arts?) is decidedly a one way relationship which lasts only so long as the artist produces "useful" art. Back to Malevich, he managed to survive Stalinist reclassification of his beloved modernism as "bourgeois", but the price of his survival "was a fundamental betrayal of his own artistic ideals."
Malevich produced some of the most beautiful abstract paintings of all time. The trajectory of his career is the pre-revolutionary "Morning in the Country after Snowstorm" to Stalinist kitsch, "Reapers". "Not only does ["Reapers"] represent an abject surrender to ... Socialist Realism," Kramer writes "but its very subject matter -- those well-fed peasant women harvesting the grain in what looks like a pastoral idyll -- is the most cynical propaganda. For it was precisely this moment in history that Stalin was carrying out his program of collectivization, which caused the deaths of millions of peasants...." Apart from the historical context, "...this painting would be difficult to take in purely artistic terms, for it marks a return to everything Malevich had categorically rejected in his art." Kramer concludes with this:
When we come to ...["Reapers"], we find that Malevich, too, was finally devoured by the Revolution he had so ardently supported. He survived by dishonoring the art that won him his place in history. We should not contribute to that dishonor by making romance of the politics that was finally so murderously at odds with the art often produced in its name.
I freely acknowledge the hyperbole of in any way equating Stalinist Russia with 2009 America. The lesson, however, is the same, if not of the same magnitude. The entanglement of big "A" Art with the State, any State, is always a Faustian bargain at best. Do we even want to start down this path?
[Quotations from The Triumph of Modernism, Hilton Kramer (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2006)]
