Good politics and bad art
3:54pm Monday, 4th June 2007
It's becoming commonplace to talk about a revival of political art - just look at all the plays that have recently been written about evil Mr Bush and his lapdog Mr Tony. But is any of it actually any good? I've seen a couple of examples of the genre in the last week or two, and they leave me cold. Has good politics started to equal bad art?
What sparked me off today was the picture at the centre of the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. Tony and Cherie are shown being expelled from no.10 while body parts etc rain around them. Now I don't want to get into a debate about the rights or wrongs of Iraq - my argument is about whether it's sparking good, effective work - and I'm rapidly becoming inured to this kind of brutality.
In fact, I think it's possible to argue that by repeating the same motifs of brutality and venality around the prime minister, the cavalcade of anti-Blair art is actually starting to anaesthetise people to the reality. At best, it encourages a resentful passivity disguised as radical pessimism. Plus, let's be honest, drawing Blair surrounded by corpses and brutality is about as fresh and clever as scribbling a Hitler moustache under his nose, or attaching George Bush's head to a monkey's body.
I'm not against political art at all - quite the opposite. I just think that it needs to be cleverer than this, particularly at a time when we are constantly bombarded with shock and spectacle. Iraq needs a Guernica or a Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag, or a Straight to Hell. Something to surprise and challenge people into thinking differently, rather than entrenching the same old tired images.
As for the kind of politics that's entrenched in the contemporary arts establishment, Nick Cohen skewered them better than I ever could. A lazy set of unchallenging values that let the rich and powerful feel radical without ever challenging their position or their society. Just stick Bush and Blair in your opera about a corrupt dictator and watch the plaudits roll in. Better still, use the word 'resistance' a lot to describe what you're doing.
We need and deserve better art than this to describe the times we live in.
I await the rapid demolition of this post by Sam Jones.
What sparked me off today was the picture at the centre of the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. Tony and Cherie are shown being expelled from no.10 while body parts etc rain around them. Now I don't want to get into a debate about the rights or wrongs of Iraq - my argument is about whether it's sparking good, effective work - and I'm rapidly becoming inured to this kind of brutality.
In fact, I think it's possible to argue that by repeating the same motifs of brutality and venality around the prime minister, the cavalcade of anti-Blair art is actually starting to anaesthetise people to the reality. At best, it encourages a resentful passivity disguised as radical pessimism. Plus, let's be honest, drawing Blair surrounded by corpses and brutality is about as fresh and clever as scribbling a Hitler moustache under his nose, or attaching George Bush's head to a monkey's body.
I'm not against political art at all - quite the opposite. I just think that it needs to be cleverer than this, particularly at a time when we are constantly bombarded with shock and spectacle. Iraq needs a Guernica or a Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag, or a Straight to Hell. Something to surprise and challenge people into thinking differently, rather than entrenching the same old tired images.
As for the kind of politics that's entrenched in the contemporary arts establishment, Nick Cohen skewered them better than I ever could. A lazy set of unchallenging values that let the rich and powerful feel radical without ever challenging their position or their society. Just stick Bush and Blair in your opera about a corrupt dictator and watch the plaudits roll in. Better still, use the word 'resistance' a lot to describe what you're doing.
We need and deserve better art than this to describe the times we live in.
I await the rapid demolition of this post by Sam Jones.
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Comments
The one thing I would add, as I suggested a couple of weeks back, is that the big story about culture and politics today is in the changing recognition being given to cultural products and creativity. This is going off on a tangent to Simon's points, but it's connected in that more superficial politicisation could distract us from some very important issues and skew somewhat the way that we think and talk about some of the key issues we face.
I think the real debate lies in how we develop the idea that culture can be read, interpreted and accommodated, for good and for bad (I'm not making a value judgement here - see the Iranian responses to the film,300). The more we render cultural products in the tabloidy ways Simon mentions, the less credible that might become.
This isn't an argument either for or against the relationship between culture and politics - it's more fundamental than that and that debate can often be a red herring. In Cultural Diplomacy, we showed that communications technologieds and increased access to other cultures means that culture is has grown importance as a space in which we relate to each other (see Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism). We need to focus on that.