One of the staples of discussion about basic aesthetic principles is that art has to exist for its own self, and cannot be prostituted to advance a particular cause or point of view. Perfect nonsense, of course, but that doesn’t keep it from being repeated ad nauseam.
There is a truth buried in all the nonsense, as there often is, but I am hesitant even to acknowledge it because of the way we moderns then move straight to the nonsense. Ham-handed propaganda is contrary to true aesthetic sentiment, because the “art” is treated as simply a sugar-coating to enable the consumer to swallow the message. The amalgamation is nine parts message to one part thin veneer art. But clunky art carrying a message tells us nothing whatever about high art that does the same thing. Virgil wrote The Aeneid to advance a political purpose. So?
Any good rhetoric teacher should be able to tell you, when people are focusing on your “rhetoric,” it means that you are failing in your rhetoric. As Ovid said, it is art to conceal art, and I would add that it is art to half conceal the deep message. True artists know how to do this deftly, and message-mongers do not. But doing it deftly and with wisdom should never be confused with not doing it at all.
Now the standard line in today’s artistic community is that the artist is beholden to no one, that art for art’s sake is the only law in the world of artistry, and away with your mundane concerns. So contemporary art tries to float above the world, seeking to provide us all with a sense of the transcendent, but these days only achieving the heights attained to by a child’s lost carnival balloon. If President Bush had been chump enough to approach America’s artistic community with a request that they use their artistic gifts to help with the war on terror, the howls of outrage would match what would happen if you took away Michael Moore’s cinnamon bun. The artistic haut monde would be as indigant as room full of wet cats. The insult to art in its pristine state would be discussed in the galleries of New York for months. Plays would be written about it, and songs composed. High dudgeon would be a phrase that I believe we could use to describe the resultant bedlam.
Come now the honchos at the National Endowment for the Arts setting up a conference call with a bunch of artists and “generally cool” people, in order ask them to sign on as artistic helper bees for Obama’s “United We Serve” agenda. Now wait a minute. What happened to the independence of all True Art? What happened to the “beholden to no man” schtick? It was here just a minute ago. Somebody needs to paint a picture of high artistic hypocrisy. But good luck getting funding.
So the independence of art from worldview and worldview concerns is a myth. Every work of art is produced within a framework of worldview assumptions. Those assumptions include values, goals, and standards. If a worldview is being subverted by a work of art, then its values, goals and standards are being challenged by another set. This is another way of saying that propaganda (things to be propagated) is inescapable. It is not whether certain values will be propagated by art, but rather which values will be propagated. And, of course, returning to an earlier point, each worldview will have its adept Baryshnikovs and each worldview will have its two-left-feeters.
And this helps us to understand what we tend to excuse for the sake of the “message.” Dispensationalists who know how to write good prose are embarrassed by the Left Behind series. But there will be a number in the middle who wouldn’t write that way themselves, but they will put up with it because it reinforces certain things that they like having reinforced. They hold to certain things and like to see them advanced. Bad prose coupled with good message, in their view, comes out okay for the most part. Let’s overlook the prose this time, shall we?
But the same thing happens in other directions. There are Christians who are not so much interested in advancing premill eschatology as they are interested in pushing the boundaries of Christian cultural norms. The message they want is that of shocking your great aunt Maude with your vampire lit. The message is the boundary challenge, and for the sake of that challenge, they can tolerate prose every bit as bad as poor pre-mill rapture prose.
So when you have some kind of wretched art that is all the rage, the first thing to do is look for the subtext. It is always there, and pointing it out always gets you in trouble. Look for the message that isn’t supposed to be there, but which always is. Brace for the reaction. We like having our little illusions.