Yes, somebody actually painted this. And no, I don’t think it’s satire. You have to sort of love the rooster, though. He’s as free as a bird now.
The question is: where’s Waldo?
You see this is why conservatives are failing when it comes to waging the culture war in the arts, and why they at once turn to political means rather than cultural means to wage that war. It’s also why we see so many conservatives devolve into self-victimization.
Conservatives have a hard time making conservative films or television shows – though occasionally you’ll find a show like 24 which espouses some conservative ideas about war and national security. I think the success of 24 was in weaving some conservative ideals into a show that focuses mostly on the action.
You rarely hear conservative music outside of Nashville. Country is one of the few successes at transposing conservative culture war politics into pop culture.
We do see plenty of sexism and other illiberal views in our mainstream pop culture, of course. See Alyssa Rosenberg’s deconstruction of the Superbowl ads for one example.
But for some reason, conservative attempts at pop culture simply don’t pan out for the most part. So we get complaints about liberal media or liberal Hollywood or whatever. But it’s not liberal Hollywood’s fault that conservatives can’t do art. (Nor is it entirely obvious that Hollywood is liberal, but that’s another story for another time.)
And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It’s just that today’s conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated. I think that The Lord of the Rings is a basically conservative text. It’s just not explicitly conservative and doesn’t say anything nasty about Obama.
Today’s conservative pop culture is reactionary, which is fitting I suppose. There was a mockumentary conservatives made a couple years ago that attempted to not very cleverly spoof Michael Moore. But an attempt to beat Moore at his own game is probably going to fail, if only because it’s little more than preaching to the choir (and this isn’t even to say that Moore isn’t deserving of his own criticism – the left is actually very good at leveling its own critique at Moore.) It’s the same in politics: conservatives aren’t so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas of their opponents.
And perhaps that’s the crux of the issue. Conservative art mimics conservative politics rather than the other way around. And so it can never really be art.
I really don’t understand your charge of literalism. The painting is full of powerful symbolism:
The chains on the people represent the oppression of Obama’s tyranny. And the protester holding a sign that says “I want my country back” represents a man who wants his country back.
I just don’t think you have a very good eye for subtext.
Liberal.
Oh man, you’re so right. It was right there in front of me the whole time!
So what’s the chicken about then?
“Seriously, what the hell’s the chicken?” (C)
Yeah, this is a really bad painting. It’s like, remember that time you went to an Obama rally where everyone was bound and shackled, and there were these weird farm animals all around? Yeah, me too! It’s like the artist doesn’t understand what a metaphor is.
Politics and art can mix powerfully, and in a way that outlives the original context. There’s Animal Farm and 1984 (as well as a ton of great essays) by Orwell, there’s Candide of course, and a ton of paintings during the French Revolution, among many others. They’ve outlived their original contexts and work on their own now. But what these–and numerous other works–have in common is that you can’t express everything they’re trying to say in a blog post. The art exists mostly to send a message, but the art adds to the message, helps make the argument, makes points that plain text couldn’t and provides new persuasive opportunities. With most conservative art (and a lot of Christian art as well), you can express what they’re saying in a blog post or tweet just as well, if not better, since it’s shorter. THAT is really the problem here. Orwell had a lot to say about totalitarianism, but “An American Carol” says nothing more than that Michael Moore hates America, liberals are evil, and conservatism is good. That literally IS a tweet. Certainly, not as effective as the Ig’s contrary view:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwe08C7tjcI
Lev, very well said.
Dude – you post this bit of awesomeness, and you don’t tell us from whence it came? Shame on you.
Is there more where this came from? It’s like Mallard Filmore with big boy pants.
I found it on Facebook. But the guy has more: http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353
Also, no one seems to be mentioning the best part of the painting, with is nod to the group of foreign Muslims, Chinese and – I am assuming – Jews (bearded guy) and -also assuming – Mexicans (dark skinned guy) that are Obama’s true puppet masters.
I think the Jew is supposed to be Ben Bernanke. The others appear to be foreign leaders — Chavez? Kim Jong-Il? Anyway, puppet masters, yes.
The best part of his paintings is another one, where a *Union* soldier is depicted as weeping, due to ‘brother fighting brother’. Not a Confederate soldier, not both together.
The best part? Ah, I Just Can’t Choose!
Awesome. My favorites are this one where our countries’ greatest leaders from the past return to get Barack and Timmy back together before the Prom:
http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=379#
And this one, which is almost as good at that one where Jesus rides a dinosaur:
http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353
Why do you consider LOTR to be a conservative text? In my younger days as a wanna-be hippie, we considered it deeply liberal – Saruman’s cutting down all the trees and damming the river to make his Uruk-Hai was like a major polluter, man.
It’s more conservative in a British sense. The politics are a bit different, in that your conservatives are trying to restore some idealized 1800s pre-industrial lifestyle instead of a 1950s industrial one. So, a Brit is meant to see all these beautiful landscapes and be shocked at them being torn down to essentially make factories. In America, the reaction is going to be sharply different, since the prevailing nostalgia here is for the days when dad went to the factory from 9-to-5, mom stayed home and baked pies, etc. I always thought the Ents were kind of a silly metaphor for nature fighting back against industrialization, but there you go. Nothing’s perfect.
Also, monarchism. (There is the One True King, and the placeholder guy is obviously just supposed to step aside.) I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of scholarship on the politics of Lord of the Rings, and also pretty sure that it falls into pre-industrial British conservatism. Alas, nothing jumps to mind right now.
I’ve just started reading “Reamde”, and the first thing that came to mind when I started reading the comment thread was Stephenson’s comparison of pot-smoking hippies to diehard LotR fans. Of course, his comparison was American-centric and you can probably get different readings of the same text in different cultures…. or even similar cultures.
American conservatives will tell you they love LOTR because of the Christian values it portrays — loyalty, courage, faith, steadfastness in the face of evil, etc. They also love the muscularity with which those values are upheld–there are no troubling calls to turn the other cheek, or to give anyone the clothes off your back. Evil is sought out, confronted directly, and destroyed.
But I think what really makes LOTR special in the eyes of many conservative is that it depicts this battle between good and evil as almost entirely a black and white affair. You know where everyone stands, and even in the few cases where there is some moral ambiguity, full redemption is usually the end result.
Contrast that with, say, the remake of Battlestar Galactica, lauded in many circles as one of the best scifi TV series of all time. That show is loaded with deeply flawed characters who muddle through in an uncertain universe, often do immoral things for their own, selfish purposes, and even when they did the right thing, it could be for the wrong reason.
Conservatives typically hated that show (not all, I grant) because it was everything that LOTR was not. It was full of moral uncertainly and ambiguity, and never give anyone a chance to root for a character that was unambiguously righteous, moral, and brave. Worse, it even portrayed the employment of highly immoral acts, like suicide bombing, by the people you are supposed to be rooting for.
It made for gripping television, but conservatives really did not like the show much at all, and even conservative fans would often gripe about the moral turpitude it employed.
There are no such difficulties when watching LOTR.
i’ve often wondered what drives movement conservatism’s aversion to nuance and love of stark black and white scenarios. do you think it’s religion? what about the tendency of the habitually paranoid to divide the world into safe spaces and then the “others” who are all out to get them?
one of the most troubling consequences of what is essentially a manichaeist worldview is the death of empathy. or does a lack of empathy drive someone to think only in black and white terms? chicken and the egg? however its brought about, once someone loses the ability to step into the shoes of another and see through their eyes (e.g., slaughtered Iraqi civilians), so much of the evil we see in our world becomes possible and immanent.
In my experience, the religion one chooses is a reflection of one’s innate psychological disposition. An aversion to nuance and the need for black and white scenarios is why so many churches are filled with exactly the same kind of people and why members of specific churches tend to have similar political outlooks. Denominations are just social tribes that reinforce one’s beliefs and world views. Man makes the religion and in turn religion makes man even moreso, Its a giant feedback loop.
I think that strongly ideological people of all stripes–right and left–are disposed towards black-and-white thinking. This is the fundamentalist mind at work: the moral universe is absolute, and deviation is not merely misguided, but evil.
We are in an historical moment where the right is dominated by a fundamentalist sect. “Impure” conservatives are being purged from their ranks (through social pressure, primary challenges, etc.). That it has lasted as long as it has has been a thing of wonder to me; although I place the primary blame with liberals who are hapless, fearful, and unable or unwilling to think through their ideology in terms of an overarching moral vision.
Absolutist views of every stripe are virtually guaranteed to exclude 98% of the real world, almost by definition. And nuance, metaphor, and syllogism are too ambiguous, and too indistinct to fit into a fundamentalist mindset. Thus, the “market” is not merely a way of allocating goods and resources, it is ordained by God, and part of the natural order. Homosexuality is not a choice, or a mere deviation from the average path, but an affront to nature.
And symbolism must be so concrete and so literal (“the chains represent the chains of oppression…”) that it is no longer symbolism, and no longer has resonance: it instead becomes mere illustration of cultural tropes. So Obama steps on the flag by stepping on the flag. And Obama’s “backers” signify their status by–wait for it–standing directly in back of Obama.
I’d partially agree, but only partially. I see a lot of stories of fall in LOTR, but not a lot of redemption. (Theoden, maybe).
The other things that makes LOTR different from hard core right wing stuff is that good and evil aren’t just jerseys people wear. It is made very clear that the Ring (whatever it represents) is inherently evil and that to use it will necessarily corrupt you, and that therefore being good doesn’t just mean fighting evil, it means resisting the corrupting influence of the Ring.
Boromir is another, and then there’s the maturation of the likes of Merry and Pippin, while they were never anything close to evil, they grew out of their immature, selfish ways.
Then there’s Gollum, who is wracked by alternating emotions driven by hate and love, and even then, there’s little ambiguity between the two sides of his personality.
I agree with the other posters that LOTR was a very conservative text in a certain British sense, a nostalgia for a pre-modern Britain. Another way that it is conservative is the notion that everyone has a place, a role, to play. One of the great myths of America is the idea of reinvention or social mobility. Think Horatio Alger. Think GTT. But a conservative class-based society like Tolkien’s Britain has a kind of everything-in-its-place social immobility as one of its myths. So in a way, every character in LOTR was born to play the role he ends up playing. This feels more obvious in the book than in the movie.
And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It’s just that today’s conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated.
+1 this. Additionally, this is basically my reaction to “Christian rock”–the subtlety and sublimeness of a sledgehammer.
re: Christian Rock:
I think the low quality in some Christian rock is a different matter, best not confused with the problems with conservative art discussed here.
I believe there is a pretty simple dynamic at play in contemporary christian music (the larger set, of which Christian rock is a subset). There are, essentially, two types of musicians/bands who produce CCM: 1) Christians who are looking to evangelize or otherwise practice religion, and use music as their vehicle, and 2) true musicians who happen to also be Christians, and as such Christian themes come out in their music (but their music is not necessarily explicitly or exclusively Christian in theme.)
The classic example of the former is the class of Christian metal bands that took on prominence in the 80′s – Petra, Stryper, etc. Some good examples of the latter might be Jars of Clay or Sixpence None the Richer.
For the first group, the quality of the music is secondary to the religious affect – thus the artistry suffers. For the latter, the music produced is the result of their inherent artistry, and any Christian themes are more organic and flow from their subjective life experience.
The first group, unfortunately, is propped up economically (instead of fading away into the dust of record store discount bins) for basically cultural reasons. Christians buy their records as a part of their daily religious practice, and the music just has to be “good enough” or palatable, to go along with the Christian lyrics. The second group often includes some really excellent artists (I myself am a big fan of Sixpence NTR) but is dismissed by both the Christian and secular markets. Not quite religious enough for the Christians because they sing about things other than religion, too religious for the mainstream because they sing about Christianity at all, and get labeled “Christian Rock” and thrown in with the first group.
Excellent comment. I think there are also musicians in the second group who nobody quite thinks of as Christian – The Avett Brothers have many religious themes in their music buy draw a very diverse and secular audiences for instance.
It’s a fine line to cross — ‘art’ in the Christian ghetto is generally so unironic, unsubtle and ham-handedly “message-y” to gain the acceptance of those who are watching like a hawk for conformity to dogma; which drives away most secular listeners who are looking for entertainment rather than strident reinforcement of someone’s religious ideology.
Paint the black guy backed by shadowy foreigners with a crowd of white folk in chains. Yeah, real subtle. Might as well have had him eating some watermelon on stage.
What about South Park?
South Park isn’t conservative – it’s libertarian.
And not explicitly libertarian either.
Hmm. I won’t disagree with you that Parker and Stone (and South Park itself) don’t fit an easy conservative definition, but at that point it’s just begging the question. There are episodes of South Park which you could easily call “anti-liberal” in the same manner as a lot of the called-out bad conservative pop culture. Think “Smug” or “Manbearpig.”
Direct spoofing is difficult to pull off successfully and often leaves you with art like the painting above. People dislike being preached to. But if the standard for conservative art is “informed by conservative sensibilities,” you could find lots of examples. Not just Lord of the Rings, for example, but much of the modern fantasy genre.
The essential difference between the conservative mind and the liberal mind is that the latter is capable of imagination. Liberalism flows from imagination — the ability to imagine things different than they are.
That’s why liberals utterly dominate creative occupations. Imagination. It’s the missing chip in the conservative motherboard.
Of course there are always exceptions to the rule but you have a valid point. Our makeup and points of view strongly influence our choice of professions. Its the same reason you don’t see a lot of liberals in the banking industry.
If you go to the artist’s website (http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353), you can scroll over one of his masterpieces and unlock the Joycean mysteries of its symbolism!
Some of my favorites:
- Pregnant Woman: “She is pointing at the mother with the child with a disability and is saying to herself, ‘I want to keep my baby.’ She represents hope.”
- Supreme Court Justice: He “hides his face in shame as he considers some of the court decisions that have done damage to our country. On his wrist watch the time reads 11:59 to signify that thtere is little time remaining.”
- “The red sash” worn by Jesus, who is holding the Constitution(!), “symbolizes the blood spilt by Americans for God and country.”
“I painted Satan to be hardly noticeable as he lurks behind the movie director” (who “represents those in the entertainment business,” the majority of whom “are intensely liberal and lean toward a Socialist form of government”—i.e., Satanism). “I tried to make him creepy and dark” (he looks very similar to Emperor Palpatine) “to symbolize the enemy to all righteousness. I don’t know for sure what he looks like, but I know he is very real. He probably is good looking, but as a symbol for evil I chose to paint him dark and sinister.”
I could keep quoting for a long time, but I’ll leave it at that. This is so awesome. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!
You’re very welcome.
Thanks, E.D. , and thanks for some sanity in the question of why there aren’t more explicitly conservative works produced by the eight major film studios and various TV studios. “Hollywood,” if such an entity could be said to exist, cares about one thing: making a profit. If you can, as the producers of “24″ did, figure out how to do it, they will love you forever and greenlight everything you want (with weird exceptions–the absence of “Anchorman 2″ is inexplicable, but due to Paramount’s stupidity, not politics on either side). As someone who occasionally works in this industry, it drives me nuts when conservatives complain that the absence of conservative movies is due to a liberal conspiracy. You want a conservative movie? Call up Rupert Murdoch and pitch him directly, for God’s sake. He *owns* one of the eight major studios.
The occasional flare-up over random actors’ views ignores the fact that the vast majority of actors are powerless in most situations, and that it’s studio executives and producers who hold all the power, and they tend to be a more conservative bunch.
Years ago, comedian Bill Hicks said: “Fundamentalism breeds a lack of irony,” and I always thought that basically answered your question. Since the modern American conservative mindset is so closely aligned with fundamentalist Christianity, it’s no surprise that the conservative inherently requires an absolute and literal interpretation of, well, everything. There is no room for subtlety or nuance or hidden meaning. Everything must be taken (and expressed) literally. McNaughton’s paintings, including the latest “Obama stepping on the Constitution” painting that’s been going around is indicative of the mindset’s affect on their culture. It is an actual painting of Obama literally standing on the Constitution, just as the common man above is literally in chains. And their attempts at humor are just as bad. There’s a self-published right-wing trash paper that shows up on my doorstep every now and then and the editorial cartoons STILL talk about how Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy sure were fat. That’s the best they got… i
You don’t quite answer the question you ask though I think you hit some points.
1) Modern conservatism only complains, it is angry ideology that does not assert anything positive. Angry comedians or singers or any type of artists only goes so far. And how far the “angry” art goes depends on the level of artistry. Like the art of the 3rd International it is most concerned with articulating a didactic message as opposed to attaining a level of lyricism through the commitment aesthetic excellence. There has been angry leftist art (ex. Pablo Piucasso’s epic painting Guernica) but what was that work angry about (slaughter, death, and the abuses of power)? What are contemporary conservatives angry about? Women making decisions about there health. Minorities being given opportunities to live better lives, the privileged having to share their privilege.
2) Pop culture is that exactly popular culture, it is the voice of the masses their expression of their views about the world. Conservatives despite their rhetoric are most concerned with the views of those in charge. The messages being expressed through conservative pop art does not reach out to the masses of people because those are not the views of the masses.
3) Corny. Conservative attempts at pop culture are corny because the “values” conservatives seek to uphold, are no longer ubiquitous to modern US culture. Conservatives seek to preserve or are in touch with values of eras long past (which never really existed as they remember) and no one wants to go back to because we would not consider youth culture before rock and roll worth participating in. The types of attitudes, behaviours and figures that encourage creative expression and serve as examples of the possibilities of popular culture are spurned by conservatives. Who do you want as your generational symbol of creativity and expression, Pat Boone and his descendant or Little Richard and his?
4) Independence. Conservatism despite its rhetoric is not interested in individuality that is different from its expectations. That means certain types of creativity (rebellious, outrageous, subversive) are not encouraged, and what follows isn that certain types of creativity don’t yield interesting results.
ipso facto Conservative pop culture is boring as shit.
I like to imagine Obama as Omega Red, with his evil commie tentacles choking the freedom out of us all.
If you want to go with obscure comic book references, you could always go with Achebe, a villain from Christopher Priest’s Black Panther run.
“And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It’s just that today’s conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated.”
I think this is the crux of the problem. For example, I think “Gran Torino” is a well-made film with conservative themes, but it doesn’t waste any time ranting about godless socialist libruls destroying America, and it celebrates immigration’s effect on America, so it might not even be recognized as conservative. In other words, it doesn’t follow in lock-step with the dogma that’s required of movement conservatism today.
Gran Torino certainly has themes of self reliance and hard work, community and family, etc. So that might count as conservative in a sense. Eastwood has a conservative streak. But his films are full of depth and complexity. Great comment, thanks.
For myself, pop culture does not equal Art. The problem with ‘conservatives’ isn’t about being ‘reactionary’ (or didactic), a somewhat odd point to make in a blog post, that brings up Michael Moore. It’s that most ‘conservatives’ just lack Talent.
Last time I picked up a History of Art book, over half of it could be considered ‘conservative’ if by that you mean, ‘religious.’
Interesting post, though.
I certainly agree that today’s movement conservatives don’t do humor and irony well, although I’m told that part of Rushbo’s appeal is that he’s funny (to his listeners, anyway). But I would hesitate to draw big conclusions about “conservatism” and its relationship to art or even to humor based on what we’re seeing at the moment. First of all, some of the greatest works of literature have been works of conservative social-political protest, or at least have reflected a conservative social vision: Aristophanes made raunchy and often brilliant jokes at the expense of early democracy; Shakespeare was a monarchist, militarist and anti-Puritan (when Puritanism was the wave of the future); Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” lamented the modern disenchantment of the world; Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera” were protests on behalf of the old order against rising capitalism and its tawdry politics; and Melville’s “Moby Dick” was a clarion call, alerting America to the evil of whales and the urgent need to go kill them. (At least, that’s how I read the Cliff Notes.) Another problem with drawing broad conclusions is that we don’t know what’s being produced today that will be looked back on as great, because we don’t know what people of the future will value. I strongly doubt that the “Left Behind” series, for example, is going to become a landmark of the American canon, but there were those who thought the same about “Moby Dick,” which in fact was largely forgotten for fifty years.
I’m guessing it’s not “conservatism” but certain kinds of rigid orthodoxies, of whatever kind, that tend to snuff the life out of artistic expression. Stalinists and their fellow travelers weren’t a barrel of laughs either, and I can’t recall many works of enduring beauty that came out of the Inquisition. When we say “conservatives” in a discussion like this one, we’re referring to people of that sort — and it’s important not to do this tautologically, i.e. to define conservatives as humorless ideologues and then point out that conservatives are humorless ideologues, not great artists. The Jonathan Swift of today probably isn’t mocking Barack Obama (small potatoes) but satirizing globalization, updating Aristophanes on the follies of mass democracy or Swift on politics and high finance, or otherwise pursuing themes that we wouldn’t necessarily recognize as conservative on the current right-left spectrum but that — we’ll eventually see — are worthy attempts to defend classic virtues and time-tested social arrangements against decay, neglect, “creative destruction,” etc.
Great comment.
JA Smith – my comment re: Tolkien in the post was meant to express something of what you’re saying here. There’s been plenty of very good conservative art, literature, and so forth. These days, however, it seems that the “rigid orthodoxies” so dominate the conservative mind that any attempt at art falls on its face.
This I agree with, most certainly:
One more thing to note is that I’m not really referring to conservatives en masse here, but rather to the conservative movement and to the efforts by that movement to respond to what they perceive to be liberal domination of media and pop culture. I should probably say something about Big Hollywood and the rest of that blogging empire while I’m at it, but I don’t have it in me at the moment.
In any case, really terrific comment. Thanks.
It isn’t a chicken. It’s a cock and I’m surprised that the biblical allegory isn’t obvious. It would be to Conservatives. The cock is due to crow 3 times.
As a European I feel saddened and dismayed by the resentment of Obama by a large number of Americans. It is clear to that they are racist. And they are in denial about their racism.
Some Christian friends of mine in Ireland had a couple of conservative Americans visit for a couple of weeks. They told me that their guests had spent their entire visit complaining about Obama, how they HATED him. I asked what specifically they objected to and all my friends could remember (it was mentioned again and again) was Obama going around the world “apologising for America”. Well, every rational person inside and outside the US knows that is a lie. I said “Sounds like they watch Fox News” and was told “Oh yes, they mentioned that a lot” (my friends have never seen it and know nothing about it).
And these people call themselves Christians. They are hate-filled bigots. And frankly not very bright. Hence the birtherism, the claims that Obama is a Muslim, a socialist, someone who denigrates America etc. Only people of very low intelligence could believe these lies. Unfortunately there are millions of them. I can’t think of another country where there is such hatred of a democratically elected leader and such an endless campaign of lies.
I agree with your post, but I’d probably extend it to include Liberal/Left-wing art, as well. I’ve gone to lots of poetry readings where a prominent poet will pull out his or her new “political” poem, and they’re always serious groaners, full of cheap shots and whiny nastiness. Maybe I don’t get out enough, but nearly all political art I’ve experienced is clumsy, reductive, and just plain sucky.
I don’t think E.D. had “political art” in mind so much as pop culture in general. There are lots of facets of pop culture that may not be overly “political” but that carry “political” messages. Take rap for example. Or even “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
The problem is obviously that conservatives only have the capacity to do “political art” whereas everybody else is able to do art/culture that may occasionally have political aspects.
Right. I find explicit left-wing art pretty onerous as well. I’m talking more about the ability or lack thereof to insert conservative/liberal/etc. values into mainstream pop culture either through modern art, or film, or television. And the only place I see it being done very successfully is with country music. Political art itself is another ballgame, but the left manages to insert their political and cultural values into pop culture without being too explicit.
i’ve just been pondering the notion of “explicit left-wing art” for a bit and i honestly can’t visualize much if anything beyond bill maher (and his political comedy ilk) and angry lesbian bookstore soliloquies about vaginas in chains. i guess some of the urban poetry slams might qualify but only in a “rage against the machine” way and not so explicitly leftist.
for art in a more general sense, i think that a big hurdle for a rigid, conservative ideologues to overcome before potentially becoming a great artist is the prevalent (modern) conservative inability to think outside of a rigid, rabidly reinforced box. great art (and no, by which I do not include Thomas Kinkade) routinely requires the ability to learn modalities that fundamentally rearchitect the always-artificial construct of Self that we all build for ourselves. in my experience, i have tracked a number of folks that i grew up with to see how they’d turn out later in life. a large proportion of the folks i knew who always seemed to be jealously guarding a never-changing construct of Self (erected, e.g., by hyper-religious parents, heavy-handed churches they went to, trauma, etc) grew up to be pretty irritating conservatives.
and yes, by way of caveat, i am largely talking about modern movement conservatism. there were certainly times when the bounds of understanding were being pushed by people who actively sought to break down and rebuild their constructs of Self. love her or hate her, Ayn Rand was a transformational thinker in her earlier years. she created some great works and great thinking. in her middle to later years, she calcified the way that so many of us do – but she was a dynamo when the shackles were off.
I think a movie like “On The Waterfront” would qualify, and picasso’s “Guernica,” mentioned above. But those are all from 50+ years ago, and you have to make certain allowances for them in order to enjoy them now.
There will always be bad art (left wing or right wing) when a political agenda is the driving force. That still doesn’t change that modern conservatives seem incapable of making any good art. The characteristics of the artistic mind (intuition, flexibility, open ended thinking, the ability to see things from multiple perspectives, etc) are not often found in those who subscribe to rigid social ideologies.
I think this ties in with the other odd aspects of the conservative mind, i.e., the general inability to have a sense of humor or understand irony, and particularly their penchant for literal, one-dimensional thinking.
In that vein, hasn’t it ever struck you as amazing that there aren’t any good conservative comedians? I mean, I guess you can count Dennis Miller but he hasn’t done comedy since he turned into a wingnut — and he was more of an iconoclast libertarian before he went over the cliff.
Likewise, there are no great liberal talk radio hosts. I think the audience for both groups is just very different.
Someone brought up South Park earlier, and I do think they are pretty libertarian, so apparently libertarians can pull off humor decently. Maybe it has to do with the social conservatism. It’s just not that funny to make fun of gay people these days (Eddie Murphie did his best back in the 80′s.)
calling south park “libertarian” is a really big stretch. if you’re talking about the kind of rational, loose, evidence-receptive libertarian “handsoffishness” streak with respect to social issues that we had a lot more of in the 90s, maybe. You know, legalize drugs, stop bashing gay people, etc.
but i think that trey and matt would have a ton to say about them getting branded with a generic “libertarian” label without 5 pages of caveats.
i think of them as much more anti-corporatist than anything else (which is sooooooo not what about mainstream “libertarianism” is all about today (with some exceptions)). south park can skewer both major parties because both major parties are enslaved to the donors and lobbyists for which the politicians have to do quid pro quos (i’m sorry, i mean “give them access so they can listen to their concerns”). not to mention the military/security industrial complex.
i don’t think it’s very helpful to rub some glue onto a confetti-sprayer of one-word political labels and see to whom each piece loosely sticks.
a hodgepodge of anti-statist leanings borne of dissatisfaction with the corrupt corporatist machine that runs this country from within both parties doesn’t a libertarian make. yes, trey and matt probably want to end the drug war, legalize prostitution and hack away at the Security State Tower of Babel we’ve erected — but I very much doubt that a lot of their passion is driven by unshackling the hands of “job creators” when it comes to minimum labor condition standards or environmental regulations.
[and yes, I realize that some actual "libertarians" have a slant that meshes with such a worldview but ne'er can we whitewash the flaws of our leaders by a few good people who disprove the rule]
To add to Smith’s list above: Yeats (“scorn the sort now growing up”) is supremely convervative, as is late Auden, more subtly (early Auden was liberal and had the subtlety of a hammer.) La Dolce Vita is a conservative film; it puts modern society on the dissecting table and shows it to be rotten. Evelyn Waugh, obviously. Trollope was a Whig but The Way We Live Now strikes me as conservative: the only sympathetic characters are the rural traditionalists. Tanizaki. Walker Percy. T.S. Eliot, of course. Pope, Johnson, Balzac, Chateaubriand. Don Giovanni, in which the hero sings a hymn to sexual freedom–and then sexual freedom turns out to look pretty evil. Dostoievski. I could probably make a case for Dante, Flannery O’Conner, Yukio Mishima, and some others, although with individuals on that level I’m not sure any political label works much.
So the “conservatives lack imagination” theme suggested by a few comments seems remote from reality. Maybe it’s schematic practical politics that doesn’t make for good art?
i think E.D. mentioned a few times that he was targeting modern “movement” conservatism. as i point out in my note above, there were times of yore in which sober, conservative art and thought were able to flourish. this just doesn’t seem to be one of those times — when movement conservatism requires such a rigid “faith” in their belief system that any heresy is quickly expunged in the great war to defeat the enemy du jour.
Christopher, as others have pointed out as well, this is sort of the thrust of my argument: once there was great conservative are, now not so much. Why? Because it’s become politicized art rather than art for its own sake. Long gone are the days of Yeats and Auden or T.S. Eliot.
Could it possibly be because modern conservatives consider art in general (and certainly poetry) to be a somewhat sissy pursuit? So much of the modern conservative mind is occupied with hating gays, and art has always been a gay-friendly realm (relative to the rest of society). In the days where every gay was closeted, it may have been easier for conservative artists to not notice his fellow gay artists–or to even be a gay artist himself. This was possible because homosexuality wasn’t a political issue. Being gay was something you did in secret.
But now, art is much more overtly gay. This is not to say that most artists are gay, but art as a whole wears gayness and gay-friendliness openly. I think artistically-talented conservatives go into the arts less than before because of this.
As a liberal gay man in an artistic field in a conservative section of the country I can say with some degree of assurance that the problem is not with all conservatives. Its merely that blow hard, anti-elite, know nothing and proud of it conservatives who get all the spotlight these days drown out sane, educated conservatives who come from a tradition of supporting arts and culture. My colleagues and I may disagree about politics but we respect and value each others artistic talents.
Of course. This is speaking in broad terms only.
Oh I agree with your original comments E.D. Conservatives are underrepresented in the arts these days because classic conservatives have been marginalized by this bunch of anti-intellectual, joe six-pack yahoos dominating the Republican party right now. I was just commenting on Robert’s assertion that it might be the gay angle. And he’s right to some extent. Some of these yahoos are distrustful of anything considered even the slightest bit effete. But there are still some sophisticated conservatives still out there who have an appreciation for the arts.
I’m thinking more at the formative stages. A guy with artistic talent might take a high school theater class because it’s for “fags” or is “ungodly” or some similar reason. People who might have entered arts as a career in early generations may not do so now because of their parents’ and peers’ antipathy towards gay people combined with the arts being more obviously gay than in previous generations.
This is just a guess, though. I can say that in Houston, the art world is almost completely liberal (politically)–indeed, there are artists I know who literally don’t know any conservatives at all. Their parents, friends and peers are 100% liberal. That might reflect the bifurcation of American society, but I think there is a sense among socially conservative people (including young people) that the art world is full of gays and people who live weird lifestyles and folks who in general are sinful people.
I’d like the visual art world to be more diverse because I think it would be more interesting and contentious. But I honestly don’t see how that could happen in the present time.
Obviously this is a generalization, and it’s hard to prove that someone chose not to become an artist or an actor for any given reason, mainly because identifying people who thought about being artists but didn’t is pretty much impossible in the first place.
I obviously meant to write, “A guy with talent might NOT take a high school theater class because it’s for “fags” or is “ungodly” or some similar reason.”
a final thread in my stream of consciousness on the topic that came to mind is that great conservative literature is often fueled by a genuine passion to fight against what is generally considered to be a credible danger.
ludwig von mises was a european-born Jew of aristocratic provenance who fled from the tide of Nazism in Austria to New York and wrote in the age of communist ascendancy in many parts of the world.
ayn rand was the daughter of a bourgeois pharmacy owner who fled to America from soon-to-be communist russia after the bolsheviks confiscated her father’s business.
and on and on. they say that times of great crisis make great men (or women). mises and rand are only two examples but history is replete with similar stories.
the problem with our modern age for modern movement conservatives seems to be that credible threats (other than terrorism) that require great epistemological thinkers to emerge – are largely absent. as great conservative thinkers shrink back to more earthly pursuits, the vacuum gets filled by hucksters, charlatans and snake oil salesmen like Jonah Goldberg and his *cough* magnum opus, Liberal Fascism.
by the way, i think it’s the same artist but do you remember this amazing painting of Jesus blessing the founding fathers back in 2009? http://www.librarygrape.com/2009/10/and-jesus-blessed-this-nation-at-our.html
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The fact that people need to reach so far back, into eras where the definition of “conservative” scarcely relates to modern American conservatism proves my point.
Yeats? Really? You’re reaching back to pre-WW2? Because an Irishman born around the time of the American Civil War is really the ideological sibling of Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party and Sean Hannity?
Put all your strained and anachronistic examples together in a pile and I’ll match you ten to one with liberal creatives. Twenty to one.
The problem, I think, is that modern conservatives are trying to make conservative art instead of just make good art and assume that the conservative message will come through on its own. As numerous commentators here have said, any time you try to politicize art, you end up ruining it.
I highly recommend abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell’s poem “A Fable for Critics.”
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1163/
He spoof the leading American writers of the day, concluding with himself. He portrays himself as trying to climb Mount Parnassus (the summit of artistic excellence), but weighed down by “a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme” and warned himself, “The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching/Till he learns the distinction ‘twixt singing and preaching.”
Conservative art will never be worth anything until modern movement conservatives “learn the distinction ‘twixt singing and preaching.”
Great post and thread. Here’s an excerpt from an overtly liberal poem. Works for me.
But if one of those children came near that we have set on fire,
came toward you like a gray barn, walking,
you would howl like a wind tunnel in a hurricane,
you would tear at your shirt with blue hands,
you would drive over your own child’s wagon trying to back up,
the pupils of your eyes would go wild.
If a child came by burning, you would dance on your lawn,
trying to leap into the air, digging into your cheeks,
you would ram your head against the wall of your bedroom
like a bull penned too long in his moody pen.
If one of those children came toward me with both hands
in the air, fire rising along both elbows,
I would suddenly go back to my animal brain,
I would drop on all fours, screaming,
my vocal chords would turn blue; so would yours,
it would be two days before I could play with one of my own
children again.
From “The Teeth Mother Naked at last,” Robert Bly
Thanks. Neat poem.
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I say it’s a photo. It’s REAL.
But in the meantime… what about South Park? Is it art? Is it conservative?
No, South Park is libertarian and only in passing. They are much more concerned with making fun of everything than with an explicit political message.
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I have taken a strong interest in the essential psychological differences between conservatives and liberals and have collected a mountain of data on this subject. For me, the most salient factors are imagination and empathy. The work of June Carbone and Naomi Cahn with the Yale Law school’s Cultural Cognition Project gives a bird’s eye view of the split but for more detail there is the work of Jean Decety, Philip L. Jackson, and Claus Lamm on the neuroscience of empathy. Colin Firth was a co-author of a paper on the neural differences conservatives and liberals http://blog.psico.edu.uy/cibpsi/files/2011/04/brains.pdf . There is an entire area of research devoted to behavioral genomics or evo-devo as it is sometimes called. There are good reasons to believe that science will show how our genotype influences our personality and somewhat commensurately our political views. Bottom line, conservatives are lacking in empathy and imagination and that is a sure indicator of abysmal failure in arts and entertainment except for the lowbrow crap like action/violence movies etc, i.e. very low empathy (go ahead, make my day) and imagination (how many car chase scenes does it take to bore a conservative? ans. Nobody knows since the limit has not yet been found.)
So liberals have imagination and empathy, and conservatives don’t?
Yay for us, then!
My comments were hurried and not well organized but there is good reason to believe that there is a Darwinian advantage to having low empathy and low imagination in that humans have been agricultural for 10k to 12k years and during that time the institution of war has become an increasingly central organizing principle along with the social co-evolution of the technology of war and the hero mythology of the warrior. In battle, the individual who can kill quickly without feeling empathy for the person being killed or imagine the suffering of those close to the slaughtered individual will have a split second or more advantage over the soldiers who are “burdened” with such considerations. The problem as I see it is that war is no longer a viable (species viable) means of conflict resolution. I hope I don’t need to go through the technological means of WMD that have made war obsolete(I am in a very solid position to do so in that I have advanced degrees in mathematics and physics and have worked professionally in computer science applications to advanced technology applications including applications of artificial intelligence to same). The real problem facing humanity is that cultural change is usually much slower(witness the renaissance and the more recent “cultural wars”) than technological change and the effects of cultural change to drift into the gene pool takes about fifty generations according the best present evidence from evolutionary psychology. I believe that we need to focus the best creative minds on how to have a global consciousness change that can result in the survival of humanity. Paul Gilding talks about this in his recent book “The Great Disruption”. There is a kind of addiction to thought/behavior patterns that only change for most people when they have a “hitting bottom” experience. Like Gilding, I am hopeful that we can get through the upcoming great disruption, especially if enough progressive people who are strong in empathy and imagination seriously commit to making to making it happen(we are the ones we have been waiting for). There was immense creativity and hope during the late sixties and early seventies but it all seemed to fizzle out. I am not so much interested in looking for the reasons for the failure of the beginnings of what has now become laden with rigid, unimaginative caricatures such as “the culture wars”. We humans face extinction if we don’t get our act together. I believe it is imperative for empathic and imaginative progressives to grow up and get over the fact that evolution has created a population that is half cowardly and thuggish killing machines and reach out in ways that will garner the support of the middle group that are halfway in between those of us who are genuinely caring and imaginative humans and the conservative core. We will almost certainly have to take over the US government and wrest control away from the corporatist fascists who are currently running the US government as War Inc. I have been studying the psychology and behavioral genetics of this issue for nearly ten years. I am presently working on developing websites that can be used for organizing political action in a more imaginative and proactive manner than exists at present. Maybe someone out there will take this as a challenge and make their own contribution in this regard. We have no time for bullshit! Now is the time to organize and ACT!
http://billmoyers.com/episode/how-do-conservatives-and-liberals-see-the-world/
I had already seen the Moyers interview and Jonathan Haidt is full of it. He is correct in thinking that western religion has incorporated order/authority, ingroup behavior and sacredness. He is full of shit when he says that those are part of all religions, in particular eastern religions. See his TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc) where he says that Buddhism and Hinduism also include his bottom three, namely order/authority, group identity, and a feeling of the sacred. I have been a serious Buddhist for the last fifteen years and prior to that for five years I was a practicing advaita vedanta Hindu. I have been inspired to read a lot of mythology thanks to Bill Moyers and his interview of Joseph Campbell. Ancient religion was a hodge podge of science, medicine, ethics/law, and psychology. The scientific portion of ancient religion has split off to become our present institution of science. Freud tried valiantly to set psychology apart from religion but did have some resistance from Carl Jung. Hammurabi tried to set the law apart somewhat from religion but in western society this has been an ongoing struggle(witness the Tea Party). This is where the incredible genius of the Gautama Buddha came in, where he absolutely refused to allow the god word to have any place in Buddhism. This has been largely a success story up to the present to the effect that as AlanWatts put it Buddhism is the religion of no religion http://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Religion-No-Religion-Watts-Wisdom/dp/080483203X/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3DCKZPLKKXTCY&colid=195NGAMGX6ML9 or as many like myself prefer to say, it is a philosophy, NOT a religion. As far as ethics go, B. Alan Wallace puts it very well “While ethics in Western philosophy is commonly considered a matter of religious belief or philosophical analysis, ethics in Buddhism is a practical, experiential matter. It calls for each person to examine his or her own behavior carefully, noting both the short term and long-term consequences of actions. Although an action may yield immediate pleasure, if it later results in unrest, conflict, and misery, it is deemed unwholesome. In contrast, even if an action involves short-term difficulties, if it eventually leads to contentment, harmony, and genuine happiness to others, it is regarded as wholesome” pp 158-159 “Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic” 2012 ISBN 987-0-231-15834-3 . There is, in much of western thinking, the idea that morality comes from law or can be expressed as law such as in god’s law. Horsepucky. If you understand the concept of dependent origination or the non-duality of advaita vedanta then saying that Hindus and Buddhists have a group mentality with sacred texts in the same sense as it is understood in western religion is plain hooey. One of the startling facts about Buddhism is that you can search far and wide for a religious war between Buddhists over a matter of doctrine and you will return empty handed. Western religion is grotesquely primitive as the incredibly stupid debate over evolution shows. There are Christians, Moslems, and Jews who understand what I am saying but they belong to a minority who usually describe themselves as mystics(Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Theilhard de Chardin, Teresa of Avila etc) or Sufis such as Omar Khayyam, Rumi, and Al Ghazali. In the case of Judaism there are the mystics of the Kaballah like Bahya ben Asher and Isaac Luria . I am not particularly expert in any of these but my deepest knowledge is in Christian mysticism (for an absolutely excellent introduction to the early history of the Christian church and the conflict between those who saw religion as a source of authority and those who just wanted to just get along with each other see Elaine Pagels “The Gnostic Gospels” ISBN 978-0679724537.
Returning to Jonathan Haidt, I believe he is another example of someone from a western psychology background whose church is the “Church Scientific” as B. Alan Wallace puts it which is mechanistic materialism(remember my earlier statement about my background in math and physics? I can easily discuss Godel’s incompleteness theorem, The Church-Turing thesis and people like Daniel Dennet who come from that point of view. My PhD area of study was in dynamical systems which I have continued to the present in areas like complex adaptive systems and dynamical bayesian networks) I don’t know but strongly suspect that Haidt, like many in the positive psychology movement, are recovering addicts from the Church Scientific. The spectacle of fools like Martin Seligman, who go off and spend a trivial effort perusing the world’s literature on religious beliefs and then transmogrify their ignorance into utter stupidity that at best is laughable and at worst a great disservice to opening a dialog between East and West should not be taken too seriously but instead encouraged to increase the depth of their studies. The book by B. Alan Wallace mentioned above goes over the philosophical differences between East and West like the quote above from his book and the common ground in fields like quantum field theory. Another great book is John Welwood’s book “Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation” ISBN 978-1570628238 , also see http://www.johnwelwood.com/ .
I personally believe that the real hope for humanity in the long run is a philosophical meeting of the minds between East and West. The Dalai Lama has made and effort with the mind & life institute http://www.mindandlife.org/ and people like Welwood are making an effort to build a bridge towards understanding the questions of ethics and psychological health (something the western psychologists had abandoned until the recent foray of positive psychology). It is truly pathetic how many people who call themselves PhD scientists and psychologists (PhD literally means doctor of philosophy) are little more than technicians burrowed into their little niche specialties. It is good to see that some of the people in psychology are finally pulling their collective heads out of the nether regions of specious analysis, but so far much of their attempts reflect their prior addiction to the Church Scientific and mechanistic materialism with its attendant ethical nihilism.
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http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/
Be a pal and link to the artist. For the lulz.
I would have, but so many other people already did for me…
Seriously. Greatest artist in the history of man. I have a degree in this. I know.
Actually, to be entirely accurate, at least one of the signs needs to have a misspelling or bad grammar at the least. You know…”muslin”, “moran”, etc. Otherwise, it just doesn’t ring true.
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It is really sad how politics is so very dirty and chaotic. Too many politicians or people in positions of control abuse their position, power and fame. The people are suffering because of them, due to their own desires to have and gain something in return. I may say not all, but most politicians nowadays are just abusing and doing what they want with their position and power. I hope someday things will change.
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