OPENING SALVO // THE CASUALTIES OF THE CULTURE WAR
If we let artists lay down their arms, maybe they’ll actually make art
words and image by Angel Eduardo
There is a great deal of truth to the phrase, “the personal is political.”
Politics is how we move and interact within our larger social, cultural, and national contexts. And we are products of those contexts. We inherit and are influenced by their histories. We are shaped and affected by their current mores. Who we are as people and how we operate in the world always has both a political origin and a political effect. A suffragette may have had an innate temperament that compelled her to demand a voice in society, but she was a suffragette because that voice was legally denied. A slave may both value and fight for liberty as a principle and a virtue in and of itself, but it is the institution of slavery that makes him an abolitionist.
We can’t escape this dynamic. What we do affects others, and what we can and cannot do is the result of political movements that precede us. In that sense, yes, the personal is political.
But when everything must be political, we lose sight of what it means to be a person.
As an artist, I feel this deeply. I have spent the last five years embroiled in the culture war. I began working with organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR), which are dedicated to addressing the issues of our time. For better or worse, I have dedicated my life to contributing both creatively and constructively to our often chaotic discourse.
And the culture war, like any other war, has its casualties—both personal and political.
Consider the costs of what I spend my time doing. I and many others are working to protect and promote free expression, freedom of inquiry, intellectual humility, and tolerance of dissent. We’re defending principles of fairness, understanding, and humanity, and encouraging a more open and compassionate society. We’re striving to counteract a zeitgeist that demands political, social, and ideological conformity. If we’re lucky, we’re using our art and artistic skills to help us do that.
It is important work, which I feel not just compelled but privileged to do. Being able to apply my skills as a creative to this endeavor has led to some of the most cherished and fulfilling moments of my life. There is simply nothing like the edification of knowing that you’re using your powers for good, to further a cause that matters. But it is still an immense expenditure of time, resources, and creative energy, which I may otherwise spend on other, perhaps deeper, pursuits.
Who am I? What am I feeling? What am I thinking? What would I be creating if not for this all-encompassing conflict? What ideas and emotions might I be exploring? How might I render them through music, poetry, photography, or prose?
Perhaps more importantly, who would care to consume it? Who would feel free to?
The culture war has done much more than just make the personal political. Now, the political is also personal. Far too much art is evaluated based not on its creativity or craft, not on how it makes us feel or what it makes us think, but on how it contributes to “the movement.” For many, the purpose of what we create now is not to react or respond to the world around us as human beings having a human experience, but to repeat and regurgitate our marching orders as good soldiers. And if you’re on the other side of the divide, your task is to reject and resist the enemy’s advances. We can’t see truth or beauty in their work because that concession would lead to a victory for them.
In this world, there is no point in asking questions, examining conflicting ideas, or engaging with emotions and arguments that make us uncomfortable enough to think, change, and grow—the entire point of artistic expression. No, in this world, the answers already exist and we know precisely what the stakes are: Either you’re with the cause or against it. Either your work furthers our agenda or we will attempt to destroy it, and to silence you. This paradigm has become as inescapable as a black hole. Art trying to exist outside of it is sucked into its orbit, with both sides trying to decode its message, or the leanings of its creators, to determine whether or not it has value.
That’s the political cost, which artists and non-artists alike are paying. We are spending more and more on the culture war, and less and less on culture itself. The result is vapid, shallow art that doesn’t do the very thing that art should: connect with what is human about where we are and what we are doing.
When political and ideological supremacy becomes the primary purpose of our art, and when our arts institutions use their power and influence to systematize this climate of conformity, it changes the artist. It changes what they can do, what they can create, and what they can attempt and explore. Sometimes it eliminates the artist completely. Think of all the art we aren’t seeing, the ideas we aren’t discovering, the conversations we aren’t having, and the inspiration we aren’t feeling because the artists who would deliver those gifts to us are too censored, too cowed, and too compromised to create.
At that point we have to ask ourselves: What is all this culture-warring for? What will be left when it’s over?
For all our sakes, we and our larger arts institutions have to abandon this monomania. Yes, political art is a time-honored avenue for expression, and some of our greatest works—Picasso’s Guernica, Billie Holiday’s haunting version of “Strange Fruit,” Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and many others—deal with war, politics, bigotry, and civil unrest. These are consequential and engaging pieces that touch on the massive intersection of the political and the personal. But they do more than just make political statements or express the ideological perspectives of their creators. They also get at the human condition. They invoke and engage with the complexity of reality. They say more than how one should vote or what one should believe. And they aren’t the only art that matters. For every “Strange Fruit” there is and should be a “Penny Lane.” For every Guernica there is and should be a Starry Night. For every Do the Right Thing there is and should be an It’s a Wonderful Life.
We’re losing our appreciation for this, but we need it desperately. We need to ensure that there is an opportunity for art that doesn’t “further the cause,” and simply exists to be beautiful, engaging, interesting, or odd. We need to ensure that there is freedom for artists who are willing to push themselves, and us, to places we might not be immediately comfortable or happy going. We also need institutions that are viewpoint neutral, so that the rebels, nonconformists, oddballs, kooks, and contrarians have the chance to contribute something without having to tick identity boxes or fulfill ideological requirements. We need works that stir something in us, that cause us to stop and think, that get us roaring with laughter and seething with rage. It’s all valuable. It’s all necessary. It’s all human.
I will continue fighting the good fight and using my skills as an artist to do it. But I have also committed myself to creating more art for art’s sake. We all must, because if we cede all of our artistic endeavors and institutions to the culture war, we lose so much of what makes art valuable. Without aberration, experimentation, dissonance, difference, tension, and exploration, there cannot be any art. Without art, there cannot be any culture. And without culture, all we’re left with is the war.
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