Six Reasons Why Artists Should Avoid Politics
Ideas for this election season.
In Gimme Danger, Jim Jamursch’s documentary about the band The Stooges, there’s a moment when the lead singer, Iggy Pop, talks about the band’s stubborn commitment to remain apolitical. Why? Because that’s what they wanted to be.
In 1968, it was still early days for The Stooges. They lived in the shadow of another, more famous punk band called MC5. Iggy remembers:
MC5 were bigger time Commies than we were. The big poobah of the area was [poet and activist] John Sinclair . . . We tried to avoid [politics]. We tried to avoid everything. I guess that was why you kept hearing the word “nihilist” about us. But finally at one point, John put his foot down and he wanted us to accompany the Five to play the Democratic Convention in Chicago in ’68 that culminated in bloody rioting. There was a “You’re either with us or against” moment there, and I wasn’t going for it. I still didn’t say anything and I started somersaulting around the room. That was my reaction. I couldn’t think of anything. I don’t know why but I couldn’t say No, I wasn’t gonna say Yes he just left. So finally he just left the room . . . That wasn’t what we were.
I ponder these words often. What was at stake for Iggy and his band? What was that commitment, that value, that thing that he couldn’t put into words — which he could only express via cartwheel? Was it really just nihilism? Were the critics right? Or was Iggy Pop gesturing at something real?
The adults in the room might say: Iggy should have performed at the DNC. He should have outgrown his teenage rebellion. A true rebel sets a car on fire or takes a nightstick to the face for the sake of stopping a war. A mark of maturity and growth is a healthy moral conscience and political awareness. An adult would be awake to the injustice around them. An adult would take up a Cause. An adult would use their talent, music, platform, and popularity to support doing something good for the world. Yes, the Stooges were nihilists, and jerks besides.
The counterargument to this highly moral view is that the artist has access to a certain truth, a truth that is less about morality than it is about . . . what, exactly? Here’s how the novelist Phil Klay recently described the role of the fiction writer in the New York Times, using imagery that a broken glass–crawler like Iggy Pop would admire: “The fiction writer is a child playing in the alley behind the butcher’s shop, rummaging through the trash, pulling out bits of teeth, offal, hair and hide, holding them up to the light and beaming, so pleased to display a piece of the once-breathing animal.”
That’s good as far as metaphors go. The world, with ideologies and laws (and literal wars), butchers reality; the artist tries to put it back together. Attempting this reconstruction, the artist actually creates something new: a twisted portrait of reality, a funny or scary representation of it, an imitation of the original, the baseline. The artist is faithful to reality in some possibly unconscious way. The artist is more likely to be faithful to reality, in fact, than those who are in the business of changing it through ideas or violence (i.e., ideology or war).
But what exactly does the truth the artist gives us amount to? We need to get more specific. Obviously, different types of art communicate different kinds of messages: punk rock and the Great American Novel are very different things. But we can distill a few basic categories of truth that art provides. These categories help us pick up on the deep structures of human life, which are ultimately the building blocks of politics and history. Among them:
Tragedy. In a tragedy the hero encounters catastrophe because of some flaw in his character, some secret in his past, or some other bug in the system of life. For example, King Oedipus, who does everything he can to save his city from a plague, not knowing (at first) that he is the cause of it. Or Romeo and Juliet, who pursue love and end up killing themselves. Or Jay Gatsby, making a pile of cash to reach his beloved, only to end up at the bottom of a pool, having lost his soul. It’s a pattern that you can detect in real life after stories have trained you to see it. A young diplomat who works on the Abraham Accords, promising peace, only to sweep a particular issue under the rug that will later fuel a great war . . . Or the Boomer who attends Woodstock and ends up working on Wall Street. Actually, this last example might be closer to . . .
Irony. “I’ve become what I hate” is a common fear among successful Americans of a certain age. It’s one of the main types of irony: a type of story that ends up in circumstances which are the opposite of what the hero intended. Irony can be funny, though darkly so. That’s what the ancient fear of “selling out” was about. That’s what The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit is about. In fact, the sentiment prompted J. D. Vance to shift from moderate conservatism to Trumpian populism (a trajectory that could become tragic; see above). The artist can bring irony into focus. The perception of irony opens the door for redemption (see: It’s a Wonderful Life). A lot of stand-up comedy concerns irony; Dave Chappelle is an ironist even when his jokes aren’t funny.
Comedy. Happy endings happen. It’s best to prepare for them by watching romantic comedies (e.g., You’ve Got Mail) or listening to love songs (e.g., 99% of all songs ever composed). The ultimate happy ending is a long poem called The Divine Comedy, which shows how everyone gets what they deserve and a great deal less, and how there’s a happy ending to everything — to all of human history. If all of human history can have a happy ending, even the darkest moments (e.g., wars) might end well. An artist can imagine those happy endings and draw compelling pictures.
Pattern Recognition. You hear a lot about “vibes” these days. That’s because we have access to a lot of information, a lot of “voices” and points of view, but we lack a big picture of what is happening in American culture. In fact, we don’t even have a coherent method for making or obtaining such a picture. All we have are the vague sentiments of a few writers who have their finger on the pulse, who can read the vibes. Some of them are fake, but some of them are good. These writers are seeking patterns. All those essays about a so-called post-Woke vibe shift were attempts to connect the dots between changes in fashion, slang, headlines, humor, and events. Marshall McLuhan: “The absolute indispensability of the artist is that he alone in the encounter with the present can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness to tell us what the world is made of. He’s more important than the scientist.”
Negative Capability. An artist can tell you what it’s like to believe something you don’t believe in or be something you hate. Fyodor Dostoyevksy got into the minds of Russian revolutionaries. Martin Amis got into the minds of the 9/11 hijackers. David Foster Wallace got into the mind of an evangelical Christian. (A related term here is cognitive empathy, which I wrote about here.) Artists — performing artists in particular — explore extremes so the rest of us don’t have to. It’s a very specific calling, with major dangers, and those of us who do not have it should feel happy. The rest of us go to art to get a good look at an extreme phenomenon. As war breaks out all over the world, what does a highly educated foreign policy analyst like
do? He goes to the Iliad.Carnival. In our world of exhaustively defined identities, a world where managers use the latest software to spy on their employees, a world of metrics and personality tests, a world that suffocates and fatigues, we crave some time to lay low and/or go nuts. We need to mock the hierarchies, dress up in costumes, and blow off some steam. We need to serve the servants, make a tramp king for a day, and party for a sustained period of time. Other societies have been more successful at putting on carnivals than ours. At least we have concerts and festivals. Maybe also the odd movie with its attendant fandom. Maybe a dance party or a rave. Maybe sitting around listening to Funhouse by The Stooges.
Which brings me back to Iggy Pop. What was he protecting with his cartwheels? All of the above. If he got involved in politics, he’d be involved in trying to make the world better, rather than to hold up a mirror to it. He would not have been fulfilling his calling as an artist. His actions would be compromised in one of two ways: either his art would be measured against the standard of political usefulness, or his politics would become the pretext by which to praise or attack his art.
Should Iggy Pop vote? Sure. Should he vocally support a candidate, or a cause? Why not? But as a citizen, not as an artist. As an American, not as a cultural “figure” or a celebrity. A person’s status an artist doesn’t add credibility to their political views. Their art contributes to the culture as a whole; it has an indirect and tiny, or at best very subtle, political upshot.
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"Should [the artist] vocally support a candidate, or a cause? Why not? But as a citizen, not as an artist. As an American, not as a cultural “figure” or a celebrity. A person’s status an artist doesn’t add credibility to her political views. Her art contributes to the culture as a whole; it has an indirect and tiny, or at best very subtle, political upshot."
This is exactly right. It is also, unlike much theorizing about the political responsibility of the artist, banal. But some truths are banal.
Artists can avoid politics but, unfortunately, politics doesn't avoid artists. Or an of the rest of us. We have been forced into this mess. We will have to force our way out.