The Artist and his Butcher
CrowdSource 8.12.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Art, ideology, novels, and Palestine.
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Ideology v. Art
The novelist Phil Klay came on Wisdom of Crowds back in June to talk about morality and war. This month, he’s taken on art and politics. In an essay titled, “Artists and Activists Both Have a Role. But Not the Same One,” he argues that artists must tell the truth, even when that truth is at odds with one’s politics. More importantly, he claims that good art is usually at odds with political ideology.
What is Ideology? “Art of any worth explores what happens before political ideologies take hold,” Klay writes. “Ideology is a butcher of reality, severing the muscle from bone, discarding the unsightly and inedible and delivering neatly wrapped, digestible steaks to its consumers.”
What is Art? “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.”
Some Propaganda is also Art. So argues journalist Sharon Adarlo, responding to Klay: “Even the decision to not be ‘ideological’ is an ideological choice. Some of the finest art in the world is propaganda.”
Writers Against the War on Gaza, an activist group, wrote: “Klay lazily rehashes an absolute distinction between politics and art.”
Make Art, Not War
Klay’s essay comes as part of a revival of the old argument over whether art must always serve a partisan political cause.
Essay Pulled. Last March, Guernica magazine published an essay about the Gaza conflict only to retract it after most of its editors resigned in protest. The editors were angry that the essay — written by an Israeli — portrayed both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict, implying (they argue) moral equivalence.
“From the Edges of a Broken World,” the retracted essay, written by Joanna Chen, can be read here.
Reacting to Guernica’s retraction, Klay wrote: “If your journal can’t publish work that deals with such messy realities, then your editors might as well resign, because you’ve turned your back on literature.”
Doing Something. Last May, the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood was criticized for playing a concert in Tel Aviv with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, ignoring the ongoing BDS cultural boycott. “No art is as ‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us,” Greenwood responded. “But doing nothing seems a worse option.”
The Great Palestinian Novel
Last year, a young Palestinian writer named Isabella Hammad published Enter Ghost, a novel about a theater troupe putting on Hamlet in the West Bank.
Does Art Matter? In a review last week, Ursula Lindsey describes how Hammad’s novel wrestles with just these questions of art, politics and ideology:
And yet the theater troupe members also constantly question the point of their endeavors. “Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary” … After attending one of the protests in Jerusalem, Sonia experiences “a horrible, useless revelation, which was that in some way the meaning of our Hamlet depended on this suffering. The context gave our Hamlet its force.” Not only does much Palestinian art draw its power and significance from pain and struggle; Palestinians have been playing assigned roles — heroes, villains, victims — for so long that some find themselves second-guessing the authenticity of their reactions and the purpose of any artistic expression. Mariam worries about art being little more than therapy: “When you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring.”
Pre-Nakba Stories. Hammad — a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause — wrote another novel titled The Parisian, based on the life of her grandfather. The Parisian achieves a political goal through aesthetic means: it revives pre-1948 Palestine, one of the few English-language novels to do so.
From the Crowd
Good contextualization, but doesn’t the fate of the Cult of Reason show that secularism was dead on arrival - that one cannot have Apollo without Dionysus (as also evidenced by the camp portrayal of revolutionary violence in the Opening Ceremony)? I also don’t think we need to see the Christian and the pagan as necessarily at odds: there is a tradition of identifying Christ *with* Dionysus, including by Simone Weil, who notes that the first and last acts of Christ’s public life involved wine: firstly, turning water into wine - and finally, turning wine into the blood of God.
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