With a few exceptions, I’ve noticed something remarkable about art and politics. The good guys are in favor of art as a free and vibrant force in society. The bad guys are against it. I think this is because no matter how fanciful and bizarre as art can be, it really is fundamentally about reality, and truth.
Dictatorships and leaders who are aggressively waging war don’t want that. They want to impose their own distorted version of reality on their people. This can lead to as something as evil as Nazi art, which is both ugly and banal. Or, it can be as relatively benign as the huge banner on the aircraft carrier reading Mission Accomplished.
My favorite school of official art was the one the Soviet Union created called Socialist Realism. Marvin Kalb, the longtime NBC newsman, told me that he once trained his station’s cameras on some old women sweeping Red Square with twig brooms back when he was Moscow bureau chief in the early 1960s.
He was promptly arrested and hauled before the censors. He protested he was only showing what existed, what anybody could see with their own eyes. “You are not supposed to show things as they are,” he was told. “Our socialist view of art dictates that you are supposed to show them as they should be, as they are going to be.’
I wish they could impose that school of art on any camera that takes a picture of me. But any art whose main purpose is political is really not art at all, but propaganda. It may communicate a historically valuable message about that culture and that time. But it is not truly art.
And somehow, art seems to always outlast the dictators. My favorite story about art and oppression involves the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev, who was culturally very much a peasant.
While Khrushchev was a reformer, he despised what he called “decadent art.” Once, at a public exhibition of modern art in Moscow, Khruschchev swept in, and started denouncing the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny. The sculptor stood up to him.
“You don’t know anything about art,” he shot back. They had a ferocious argument. Eventually Khrushchev stormed out. The sculptor went home and waited for the secret police to take him away.
They never did. A few years later, Khrushchev fell from power. One night, the sculptor was working in his studio when there was a knock on his door. It was Khrushchev’s son. “My father has died,” he said. “I am here to ask you to design his tombstone.”
“Are you nuts?” Neizvestny said. “Your father despised me and despised my work. Why would you want me to design his tombstone?”
“We have no choice,” the son said. “His will says that you must do it.” The tombstone, in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery is magnificent, and made out of both black and white stone, perhaps to symbolize that Khrushchev was a bundle of contradictions.
And so are we all.
Mr. Lessenberry's conflation of "Nazi art" and the celebratory banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring "Mission Accomplished," leaves a lot to be desired in terms of literary art. Never mind that the "mission" of the Lincoln (a nuclear carrier with a crew the size of a small city and carrying as much firepower as all but a vey few nations on earth) actually HAD been accomplished and its tour of the Gulf region was concluding, as it returned to port in California.
No, let's go back to the notion of state-sponsored art. Because that is the great problem with art. Nazi art, Soviet art, you name it. State-sponsored art is almost always suspect. No matter what side you are on, state-sponsored art is going to be tainted somehwere along the line. If you are Andres Serrano and you want to put your jar of urine containing a crucifix in an art show sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, there is going to be as much trouble as if you were a Soviet, told to write a symphony honoring the glorious revolution of the proletariat, or if you were Albert Speer, told to design a stadium honoring the Aryan race.
Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, Twain, Rothko; none of them got NEA grants. What they thrived on, and what all great art thrives on, was freedom.
I'm not sure if there is anyone in the United States today who presents any kind of a serious or meaningful threat to art and free expression. If we wanted to find the real threats to free expression in today's world, we'd do best to look at the enemies of America. Start with the Islamofacsists who declared a fatwah against novelist Salman Rushdie. And also the terrorist who killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. And don't forget those who would impose shrariyah-law prior restraints on things like political cartooning.
We'd also look farther afield, to the murderous Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, whose visions of literature and journalism seem to closely parallel a Hitler/Mussolini/Stalinist vision.
And we'd look to North Korea. That is, if we could, where art seems to consist of statues of the Great Leader and the Glorious Leader and whatever leader comes next. Gold-plated whenever possible. One good missile can buy a lot of gold-plating.
Now there, we have some real enemies of art. Persons, and regimes, and freedom-hating philosophies against whom the art world might just want to join the fight.
Posted by: Anonymous | March 20, 2007 at 04:41 PM