Art as a reflection of life

Michael Lewis, writing in Commentary, discusses the Art of Obama Worship. He addresses how current artists are disregarding the prior American norm of separating art from politics. That reflected a healthy separation of the private intellectual domain from the corrosive influence of politics. Using art for political indoctrination and for, by turns, idolizing the ruling clique and demonizing its opponents, is an attribute of totalitarian systems. To the extent that American art was politicized, beginning in the 1960s, it took a skeptical, indeed cynical, position against American institutions. Art was not just politically progressive. Itoften revelled in its transgressiveness, as anti-Christian and anti-Republican (especially that featuring George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld) art showed. Artists prided themselves on “speaking truth to power.” Even when their “speech” had the reasoned content and controlled delivery of a Tourette’s sufferer:

“This is not to say that 9/11 did not call forth a volcano of moral rage among artists—only that this rage found no outlet until 2003, when it came to be directed at George W. Bush. Among all the scatological, puerile, and corrosive caricatures of Bush that began to be shown at that time, one looks in vain for even one corresponding image of Osama bin Laden or Mohamed Atta. For example, In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman’s intensely personal graphic memoir of the 9/11 attacks, contains not a single depiction of bin Laden, while we are treated to scurrilous images of President Bush toppling the Statue of Liberty and a gleeful Dick Cheney slitting the throat of the American eagle on whose back he is riding.”

This sometimes self-consciously hostile art was a worrisome shift towards a mutual interaction between art and politics, especially as government funding of art expanded, a funding that began with the New Deal art that at times seemed to be a less virulent form of “socialist realism.” But, at least for a generation, this oppositional art (while clearly selective and ideologically biased in its targets) still maintained a semblance of opposition to the status quo. All of that has changed with the ascension of Barack Obama (and his political support for Artists Corps, a new federal program to support artists). And, unlike the sometimes hagiographic art that grew around other Presidents (Washington, Lincoln), Obama worship, like the Nobel Peace Prize, has erupted before the man has done anything of sufficient consequence to merit the worship. Much of that art, as I have written before, smacks of religious-type adulation:

“In one three-month period, 787 Obama paintings were auctioned on eBay, showing the new president in every possible pose, and a few impossible ones: standing commandingly before the White House, cradling a basketball and wearing a Washington Wizards uniform, gamely wrestling a bear on Wall Street, even flying naked on the back of a unicorn.
What is striking about these paintings is not their quality, about which the less said the better, but their consistent tone. They belong to that class of objects known as ‘devotional art.’ Such objects are not only intended as votive offerings, to serve as the focus of veneration; the actual process of making them is itself an act of piety, a consideration that all but places them outside the realm of aesthetic judgment.”

A leader in the Obama worship genre of current art is Shepard Fairey, the artist with the irresistibly effete name, whose Hope (and other captioned) graphic poster presentation of Obama adorns in miniaturized form many an automobile. The poster has become so paradigmatic that enterprising conservatives have made their own version. I have the “Nope” version, preferring it to the less respectful one that shows the Obama profile with the caption “Dope.” Fairey more than the others inadvertently has exposed the flackery and the lack of legitimacy of American artists when they claim to be cutting-edge critics. The true dissenters among the highly conformist artist class have been conservatives, that is, those who would expose the above-mentioned flackery and the ideological conformity and rigidity of the “arts community,” a term used loosely, as one must to include the low-brow art of these political propagandists. Such a term would also extend to the large class of musicians, singers, and actors, and accurately describe their ideological herd mentality.