POLITICAL CORRUPTION OF ART

I am not as energetic and mobile as I used to be. Simple fact of having incurable chronic illnesses and getting older. I do what I can to remain independent and even help out others. That is where I devote what energy I do have. It is a life worth living for now.

So I do not travel as I might. I did my far share when I was younger and healthier. It always seemed silly to me to wait until old age to get around a bit and see what's what. I soon learned that the world is flat in one respect: Under the cultural trappings, human nature is fairly predictable no matter where you go. Some places are controlled by more evil or more good than others. There is scenery that wows. Some places disgust or disappoint. But I reject the bourgeois notion that travel, in and of itself, is mind-expanding. It is too often simply a sybaritic distraction from what should really be attended to at home.

When I did travel, I was intrigued by art associated with place and culture. It led to reading more literature from other cultures. It did not lead to collecting, since I prefer to collect and integrate the impression of art over collecting stuff. 

One great joy of this time in my life is access to international productions via streaming. Netflix and You Tube couldn't have come at a better time for me. Listening to Celtic music on a Saturday afternoon while writing. Spending a Sunday afternoon attending a recorded presentation in London by Jordan Peterson or in Davos by Yuval Noah Harari is delightful mental nourishment. Most evenings I watch a film or several episodes of a series. It is my way of keeping up with culture while garnering some simple enjoyment.

I fear sometimes that my window onto art and culture is becoming slowly obscured by a curtain of political propaganda. This is particularly worrisome when I watch American and European drama. A not-so-subtle political filter is beginning to choke creativity. Plot lines make less sense because the protagonist might have to be an unbelievable one.  The anti-hero is becoming an all-too-common replacement for a real hero. What is presented as a good outcome sometimes does not strike me as good at all. And certain real cultural flaws that I know exist here and there are glossed over as "it's all good" or ignored altogether. 

The subtlety of the corruption of art disturbs me most. This isn't the Soviet blunting and magnifying every human form into a monstrous peasant or factory worker. This isn't the cartoonish reduction of color and form of the Great Depression's American W.P.A. murals. This isn't the soothing reassurance of Norman Rockwell's tableau art. After all, our Western art is less two-dimensional now. It is three-dimensional and very much centered on human experience, as opposed to color, shape, classical symmetry or ideals of beauty. And, since our human experience is becoming increasingly corrupted by politics woven into our electronic media, propaganda is more subtle than ever, like a heavy metal in drinking water. It won't make us all insane right away. 

I consider myself fortunate to have come of age at a time when developing a sensitivity to propaganda was encouraged. The media of my early years was peppered with many brilliant Jewish journalists, writers and publishers/producers who had been stung personally by Nazism and Red Scare persecution. Europeans were still clawing their way back from utter destruction by militaristic and aristocratic establishments for over thirty years, from 1914 to 1945. George Orwell was a literary hero, an unquestioned visionary. Ayn Rand's message of anti-authoritarianism was also popular. The rise and fall of McCarthy-ism reminded Americans of the danger of ideologues. The traumatizing assassinations of the two Kennedy's, Martin Luther King and Harvey Milk shattered identity-centered mythologies. 

Today's media are descending into propagandist tribalism very quickly. While there is still a range of political poisons in the pipeline, the great danger is the subliminal acceptance of propaganda in all art by all human beings in this globalist era. This leaves the door open to the possibility of consolidating that propaganda by one person or group of people for a deeply nefarious purpose. Digital, especially audio-visual, propaganda could be used to mobilize horrors far greater than any yet seen on this planet.