Sunday, September 04, 2005
The Dangers of Liberal Artist Groupthink
(Dammit, David, I was totally going to raise this issue yesterday, but you beat me to it. I was even going to call it "Art and Politics" too!)
Around the time of the 2004 presidential election, some composer friends and I were trying to figure out if we knew ANY politically conservative composers. I know one personally, but though he is a devout Christian and an ideological conservative, he is not a supporter of the current administration (he was even talking about voting Libertarian in protest). The gap becomes even more noticeable when looking for politically active conservative art-music composers (politically active defined as having overtly political themes present in one's music or making public statements of a political nature). As a result, I have been in numerous social (and even work-related) situations with groups of musicians and other artists in which Republican-bashing was not only tolerated, but engaged in with an almost cathartic gusto, almost as if the discussion were taking place amongst a meeting of "Bush-Haters Anonymous."
I worry about this. As a supporter of independent thought, I worry that the absence of opposing opinions and ideas in everyday conversation leads to an atrophy of logical reasoning and prevents subpar ideas from being held in check (since God knows there have been plenty of subpar liberal ideas). More importantly, as a liberal myself, I worry that a hegemony of liberal groupthink in the artist community will hamper that community's ability in the long term to engage in any meaningful way with the other, more conservative sectors of our society. In my conversations with primarily New York-based intellectual artists, I often hear an almost shocking disdain for those less fortunate than ourselves with regard to educational opportunity, and a wholesale prejudice against large swaths of our nation's geography. It is precisely this lack of tolerance for dissenting views, coming from a group of people that supposedly values tolerance above all, that I fear may ultimately turn the moderate-to-right-wing cultural mainstream against the arts once and for all.
Luckily, at the moment I feel that the arts are invisible enough in the larger society that most people are unaware of just how lopsidedly the deck is stacked in the liberals' favor in our community. As the internet and the blogosphere makes the truth more and more widely known, however, with everyone from Kyle Gann to Alex Shapiro offering up their unsolicited, uncensored, and, ultimately, unchallenged political views for all to see, I could easily see the equation "arts = liberal" becoming solidified in the minds of many regular folks. If that happens, the larger artist community will have robbed creators of politically oriented work of a chance to reach the people who most need to hear the message. Art has a powerful ability to convince through example, but people need to experience the art in the first place in order for that to happen, and it won't happen if people are deliberately avoiding the art for political reasons.
(Alex, I apologize for singling out your post on the main page, as I feel that it contained important information that needed to be shared, but I was surprised by the lack of dissent to your suggestion that "Bush and Cheney are evil" and believe that it supports my case.)
posted by Ian Moss
4:00 PM
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