Political Art

One legitimate purpose of art is to demonstrate emotionally and narratively truth that one could not effectively communicate through essays and arguments. Personally, I feel like I learned more about myself while reading The Fall than through any other experience in my life. Camus’s elucidation of guilt and duplicity is one that I could never give justice to; any summary invariably sells the meaning of the book short. That is what makes it art and great art. It is the unique utilization of the medium and the psychological and emotional evidence of indefinable truths of human existence that could only ever be know in the realm of intuition.

That is the key to art that communicates, or to be flippant about it, any art that is more meaningful than pretty doodles. It communicates ideas that can only be known intuitively. It’s hard to prove, through science and unassuming scholasticism, the notion that everyone has the right not to be attacked with a kitchen knife, but most people feel perfectly justified in believing it. That point of view is not wrong, just reliant on art or similarly intuition-based forms of persuasion to make its point (setting aside the idea that we should only protect life because no one else wants to be attacked, which in turn makes other intuition-based, consequentialist assumptions). When we are realistically unable to make normative statements on an issue, we can only make positive ones or none at all.

Art runs into problems when it stops trying to answer questions of what values we should hold and instead answers how we should get there. Art can tell us it’s a bad thing people are poor; it cannot tell us whether the government can fix it. Art can tell us to consider divinity; it cannot tell us to support churches with the state. Believing art can have any impact on whether we should end a specific war or support free market capitalism misses this point entirely. We can test, if not scientifically and especially effectively, whether such actions will have the desired effect. The failure of politicized art is a corollary to the narrative fallacy. Just as trying to shoehorn the events of history into a neat story fails to look at evidence, using art to force one’s conjectural view of life into an idealized vehicle is entirely meaningless.

Rand said,

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man’s nature.

This is absolutely true and as good of a definition of communicative art as any. Ironically, in her own books, Rand misses out the importance of this, the “value-judgments”. All too often, her villains do not somehow oppose the proposed values, but evilly want to subvert them. She later writes a normative argument in favor of capitalism, but her works of fiction suggest an inevitable failure of planning, which in turn is a positive conjecture we may test. Neither flaw belongs in a true work of communicative art.

Rand has been either vilified or beloved, and very much so by what amount to party lines. The academic community is clear in its distaste for either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, which is understandable if not for everything else but its gratuitously awkward “romance scenes.” However, her choice of values, an unholy union of Ludwig von Mises and RIchard Dawkins, is intuitionally based and non-falsifiable, and thus impossible to rationally dismiss. What throws off the analyses of the press and academics is the flaws above, which while are prevalent in art favored by left-liberals, is difficult to honestly assess until you are the target yourself. Only then does it become morally repugnant.

The flaws of The Cider House Rules and the works of Green Day are completely analogous, but far more acceptable to the left-liberal perspective. Each tell a story that matches an argument. By themselves and their nature, they cannot make such arguments.

Art cannot reasonably answer political questions. It can sway political questions as to the values one should fight for, such as the what and the why. Through more effective means can we answer the questions of the whether, the how, and the how much. Attempting to answer questions that cannot intrinsically be scientifically answered should not be categorically scorned, but the methods we use in applying those values one may quantitatively scrutinize. The communicative role of art is essential and important in the way we may form values, but it should never grasp pretensions of being better than empirics and logic in defining the feasibility of the means that may emerge from the values.