Artists have nothing to gain from politics
They're better above the fray
At the recent European elections, Dublin MEP Claire Daley received endorsements from the pop star Annie Lennox and the actor Susan Sarandon. Daley, an apologist for Russian militarism who described Ukraine as ‘puppets of another power’, duly lost.
Lennox hailed Daley as someone who ‘speaks truth to power’, considering her as a voice for peace. But this is founded on the very simplistic idea that opposing all conflict at all times is always the best way to a peaceful world, forgetting Orwell’s observation that at times being for peace is the pro-fascist option. It’s a kind of simplistic, empathy-laden form of politics which is regrettably prevalent in the arts.
We hear the argument that the artist – and particularly the famous artist – has ‘a responsibility’ to speak out. What does that in practice mean? From what I see that artists are expected to espouse a particular series of pre-agreed positions on the left’s pet causes – Palestine, trans rights, police reform – while ignoring or even denying others. Certainly, even in the long vanished world of Live Aids and We are the Worlds of my youth, there was a sense that there were a range of causes artists could agitate for and that part of the purview of an artist was in their picking of a lesser-known one to bring to mass attention.
Certainly, what is not being asked of creators is engagement with politics in a sophisticated sense; no-one is asking the artist to be political in the manner of reading the works of Burke or Locke; nobody is staging a benefit concert for the adoption of the D’Hondt electoral system. For all the fashionable talk of ‘structural’ racism there is very little thinking of politics in terms of structures in the arts; sentiment, emoting and passing fashions reign. It was almost refreshing to hear the filmmaker Alex Garland articulate in a recent interview that he had made his recent (pretty good) film ‘Civil War’ from a position of explicit centrism, if only for the rare variation on the idea of the ‘political artist’ as being by default a left-wing one.
It takes a long time to admit, particularly if you're in the arts, that the political activity of artists doesn’t really matter. None of the Artists for Palestine, the Artists for Corbyn, the Artists against Racism moves the dial even a bit. Do you really think the arts is a hotbed of pro-Netanyahu sentiment? No, these stances are simply social presentation and the forging of social capital within a specific milieu. And if that’s true for Annie Lennox – for did her intervention really help the MEP in question? – it’s sure as heck the case for the unknown foot soldiers who sign petitions and circulate letters and go on marches for the political obsessions of the arts.
Oh, for sure artists’ views can have an influence – when someone as big as Dua Lipa speaks up in favour of Albanian revanchism, for example, there’s no doubt that spreads such an idea amongst her fanbase and offers pub trivia to be exchanged amongst bemused Centrist Dads. Yet it almost always alienates as many as it wins over; for all the almost universality of soft-cultural pro-Palestinianism, it automatically creates a wedge with a part of the fanbase who, whether they have a connection to Jewishness or not, understand that in the Hamas-Israel conflict there are two sides. Most people, seeing another artists’ statement condemning the ‘genocide’ in Gaza just think – Well, they would think that, wouldn’t they. That is a world in which such terms are used.
I’m sorry to sound cynical, but on this I am cynical; I don’t think artists have any duty to be politically engaged and I don’t think their efforts generally provoke positive changes in the direction they claim to seek. Nor do I think that is the point of artists espousing certain causes. At best they are engaged in in-group formation and at worst they are bullying others in competition in a sector where resources are scarce.
Worse, I think this talking amongst themselves, this self-sorting of creatives, reduces the space for artistic gatherings to attain their real power, that of providing a communal experience; the massed ranks of fans at a recent concert of Studio Ghibli film music I attended would have a thousand different views on all manner of things, but my goodness did we all love our neighbour Totoro. At base, the demand for artists to take specific stances is a demand from a subsection of their fans for the creator to show that they are just like them, rather than retain the mystery of distance.
My cynicism comes in part from having believed precisely the opposite when I was young. I believed that artists had a responsibility to be engagé, that they had to be seen to espouse a particular left-wing agenda which just happened to be my own politics of the time. Perhaps that that agenda being specifically left-wing is just about the nature of left-wing politics, with its totalizing truth claims; more likely in my view is that conservatives are not attracted to being artists because there’s no money in it. Of course, the utter lack of financial security in the arts, often in face of seemingly having to work harder than in other professions, would make pretty much anybody within it in favour of a different economic model.
As I get older, I am feeling not only an absence of a specific political motivation for my own work, but a wider hostility to the idea; that it’s best for artists to keep out of politics at all.
There are artists whose politics I consider relatively sound, solid Labour Party men like the actors Steve Coogan and Michael Sheen. Still, what do I really gain from knowing they think this way? For every person like myself who sees their own social-democrat-leanings reflected back in these public figures, another Tory or liberal is surely alienated, and this means the cultural influence of these figures is unnecessarily curbed. If you believe that a lot of creating good art is placing things in the maximum space to generate discussion and interpretation, knowing the specific politics of its creator can reduce the scope for imagination of what the work in itself means.
At base, I’ve just come to believe art is superior to politics as a form of engagement with the world. (You’d hope so – I’m an author). Art is fluid and subtle; politics is binary and repetitive. Politics requires message discipline; art glories in ambiguity and the incongruent. A demand for an artist to speak out politically is a demand for them to move from a potentially dense and allusive field of meanings into one of clear statement and intent.
This is no doubt why radical politics has always targeted artists and artistic creation as a bourgeois luxury, and one thing to be clear on is that artists have always been asked to be more explicitly political, that the debates around the requirement for political engagement were the same in 1960s and the Cold War context as now. Shakespeare could produce Hamlet in all its dense mazes of meaning but I bet in 1600 there were pamphleteers demanding that his plays take a clearer stance on the Union of the Crowns.
Politics is many things but it is not playful, and art is the homeland of play. No wonder those demanding artists be political are often such Malvolios, people who seem offended, even if they work in the arts, by the essential trivialness of creativity.
Yet that it is why it is important to accept the essential lack of seriousness of making art; it is a silly thing to spend your time doing, and the way to respond to that is to own it, rather than trying to ballast the arts sphere into a dimension of moral seriousness. That is the word I would often use for arts politics, silly – simple Manichean tales of good Palestinians and wicked Israelis, rotten TERFs and holy trans people, fairytales that only White people can ever be racist.
The artistic view of politics bear little resemblance to the real world of politics where utter bastards achieve great things and compromise is a prerequisite of the exercise of power. I have a friend who was a local councillor in London, who engaged deeply in formal politics and won elections, and when I asked him what he'd got done in his time in office, he answered ‘A bollard.’ That to me is a political legacy.
I quite like Annie Lennox’s music. But like it a little bit less now that I know she has terrible politics, because Claire Daley is an awful politician whose public profile makes the world worse. It makes me locate Lennox’s genius a little bit more squarely in her music and ignore a bit more of everything else, and resolve to expect a little less of her in future. It’s the same way that I can now no longer listen to Brian Eno’s ambient music, a source of real respite to me throughout my life, without imagining his soft voice droning on about how NATO is culpable for Putin attacking Ukraine. It lessens the experience.
I’m all for artists being politically engaged, but that’s because I’m all for every citizen to be politically engaged, not out of a requirement for creatives to articulate whatever the current obsessions of the left are. It just doesn’t logically follow that because somebody can sing or draw or act that they should be listened to about other matters; I believe in almost all cases a diplomatic silence is a better use of an artists’ public platform than a specific political stance. Every single political speech of Jane Fonda will fade away but my goodness if her workout videos won't endure.
In their silence and presenting their work alone, artists can suggest an infinite multifariousness of political positions; once they break into specifics, these positions reduce to the binaries of the world. Or perhaps that is wrong, and perhaps silence itself from an artist is now coded as right-wing. That would mean the only options for an artist to present their politics are silence or an outspoken leftism, or at a push the fate of Ariel Pink, persona non grata in US music after attending the January 6th protests.
It would be nice to imagine an arts sector which rather than marinating in faux radicalism was genuinely political, informed, with debate about every issue from the restoration of Divine Right of Kings to the anarchist power structures of contemporary Kurdistan, that every kind of viewpoint was articulated there including, crucially, that art had a value in itself independent of a creator’s politics. That too would show the difference between an arts sector which was political and one which was politicized; not a place for the accumulation of social capital, but the airing of passionate debates. But for that to happen, a lot of entirely normal opinions would have to feel sayeable in the arts than is the case now.
Of course, if an appeal to loftier ideals doesn’t work, I’d remind artists of the Michael Jordan line which surely applies not just to art but to sport: ‘Republicans buy sneakers too.’ The one thing every artist needs is an audience, and you can’t go turning away potential punters at the gate.