Art and politics

[jbor]

'Shows of pretension' by John McDonald
February 22 2003

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/21/1045638478225.html

Article concludes:

[...]

The other key observation from this story is the self-professed radical
artist's intolerance for any other point of view - particularly an opinion
on art put forward from outside the art scene. The attitude is Stalinist.
There is only one central authority and no dissenters will be tolerated. If
that authority wants to calls itself "socialist", "revolutionary" or
"avant-garde", woe betide anyone with a different description.

In his book of 1976, _The Totalitarian Temptation_, the philosopher
Jean-Francois Revel looked at the pitiful way many socialists and
progressive liberals turned a blind eye to the sins of communism, for fear
of being labelled "reactionaries". Revel argued that since true socialism
only existed as an idea, it was wrong to treat totalitarian states as though
they represented a flawed left-wing ideal.

Just as a perceived need to remain loyal to supposed socialist states has
debilitated 20th-century left-wing political debate, so, too, have critics
and curators felt the need to support a supposedly "radical" art, practised
more often by social opportunists than by socialists. To do otherwise has
been to risk being labelled a "reactionary" or a "conservative".

This may be commonplace in politics, but such labels carry weight in art,
because the entire art world is founded on a series of shared illusions. One
cannot hope to prosper in such a world as a "conservative", and this may be
why arts bureaucrats seem to have such relentlessly progressive taste. They
look first to the art that trumpets its own radical, non-commercial
credentials when they are making funding decisions. The system is closed and
clubbish, perpetuated by the terrorism of fashion - the dread of falling out
with the in-crowd.

The problem is that politics has reasserted itself so spectacularly in our
lives, with threats of war and terrorism, that art-world politics seems more
parodic than ever. In fact, it has never been immediately apparent how
subversive artwork has had any impact on the political sphere. Museums have
been subverted every week by avant-garde geniuses, but still their doors
remain open. Millions of words have been written in catalogues and journals
extolling the political power of various artists, but somehow capitalism has
continued to thrive. All those monochromes and bits of dirty underwear shown
to so little effect.

It's not that works of art can't be political, or cannot make direct
political points. It's that there is something dishonest about the way
virtually the entire spectrum of contemporary art is bathed in an abstract
glow of political significance - even when the work is self-evidently about
nothing but space or colour or the artist's tortured ego.

We need to distinguish between works that do and don't have a political
ambition, and not simply assume that there is something intrinsically good
and holy about any piece of "radical" art. If we see artists as citizens of
a society, rather than as seers, we might start to rearrange our priorities
in what constitutes good and bad art, and good and bad politics.