Tag: questioning art

The art-bureaucrat class is currently in a state of great anxiety over the differences between responsible and irresponsible art. The artists aren’t, but these categories aren’t up to them.

Whether she wants to be or not, Kara Walker will—for the foreseeable future—be packaged and promoted as a Responsible Artist, and regardless of any articulate interviews the directors give about the philosophical or cathartic power of catharsis, pain and gore, the Saw movies will continue to be viewed as Irresponsible Art. Away from these polar extremes, the rest of the artists await the Great Dividing. Who is Enlightening? Who appeals to our Lower Instincts? Who will get to do what? With whose money?

Responsible Art includes all art where it’s clear to an uninformed viewer why someone might think it would be morally improving to look at it. Irresponsible Art is everything else.

Ways of being Responsible can conflict: An in-all-ways-pious Reformation crucifixion is Responsible Art and so is Soviet-era state-sponsored satire at the expense of organized religion—they’re both clearly getting something across about right and wrong.

Big cultural conflicts always manifest themselves in attitudes toward Responsible and Irresponsible Art:

Adolf Hitler hated jazz of course. His pilots didn’t, though—they’d fly around and pick up jazz on their radios and he couldn’t stop them—it was a problem. Their duties to drop bombs in the name of racial disharmony did not align with their taste.

The Soviet Union had notoriously strong views on the need for art to be Responsible, and—after a brief flirtation—decided abstraction wasn’t. The CIA saw and then seized the opportunity to fund this Irresponsibility. It was a way to make American life seem open and cool without having to give money to someone who might a paint a landlord getting lynched. Now there’s an AbEx painting in every bank, hair salon and seaside motel.

A decade later the Cold War took another turn. Americans began complaining not only that their sons and brothers were being recruited into a war against a Communism, but that the books they were reading, the music they were hearing, and the films they were watching were, too. So, the ’60s happened. Mainstream culture had been religious, anti-communist, pro-family, and—crucially—comprehensible. So, the counterculture went about being all the other things. Yes, John Lennon sang about giving peace a chance—which is very Responsible—but he also sang about newspaper taxis appearing on the shore—which isn’t.

We all strive, now and then, to be Responsible—and we should—right and wrong are a big deal. But in the great pick-up game of life, Team Irresponsible gets not only abstraction but drugs, dreams, sex, dream-logic, and most of the better jokes.

The control of Responsible Art is important—most of our major cultural institutions are scrambling as we speak to lay claim to it—but as these examples prove, whoever controls Irresponsible Art will win in the end. People can agree on The Beatles.

But, but… what about the Trump Question? Well, in this light you can see it’s more of a Trump Answer.

Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to openly espouse Irresponsibility, which had, until then, been a preserve of youth and, therefore, the left. JFK cheated on his wife with Marilyn Monroe? Bill Clinton smoked dope and got blowjobs? Well look at me, I fuck porn stars and my toilet is solid gold.

Trump’s masterstroke was to take what had always been a subtext of the GOP project—that if you just distribute money and power unevenly enough then some of us will get to spend all day laying by the pool doing ketamine off strippers’ butts—and made it text.

His 2016 opponent was, like him, rich, white and talked funny, but was his opposite in that she radiated Responsibleness. She could only express the Democratic Party’s promise (that if you distribute money and power evenly enough then we’ll all be able to eat and then send our children to art school where they can do ketamine off each others’ butts) as subtext.

It was still a close race—we all know that—but Trump had revealed to his friends that you could lean all the way in on Irresponsible and the church people and rear admirals would still vote for you. We may have only got our country back from him on account of the great tsunami of collective Responsibility demanded by Covid.

But don’t let them have Irresponsible—it may not look so great right now, but we’ll need it later.