Terry Teachout on Successful Political Art

Auntie Suzanne Blogs it all found an online journal called In Character. I took a look and found this great essay by Terry Teachout.

He reviewed a political play that turned out to surprise him. Why? The playwright didn't force him into any conclusions about the rightness or wrongness of a particular political position. Others that he has seen made that mistake.

Mr. Teachout reflects further on what makes good political art:

Turning messy fact into orderly fiction necessarily entails simplification; turning it into artful fiction demands as well that this simplification acknowledge the full complexity of human nature and human experience. These seemingly contradictory requirements can easily be fumbled by the artist whose principal goal is to persuade an audience of the rectitude of his cause. We do not expect him to portray the world creatively, but to tell us the unadorned truth about things as they really are. Yet propagandists are rarely prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but. They alter reality not in order to “make everything more beautiful” but to stack the deck.

Note, by the way, that in describing political art we've emphasized its persuasiveness. This is a quality it has in common with apolitical art. Both seek to persuade us of their believability in order to accomplish the larger purpose of which C.S. Lewis wrote in the last chapter of An Experiment in Criticism:

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

This is the meaning of the cliché that great art “takes you out of yourself.” By definition, it then puts you into somebody else, and in so doing enriches your understanding of reality. To do this successfully, it must be in the deepest sense sympathetic. The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines sympathy as “the fact or capacity of sharing or being responsive to the feelings or condition of another or others.” Such a capacity is a sine qua non of all serious art. It is what makes Shakespeare'’s villains believable: we feel we can understand their motives, even if we don'’t share them. It is also central to the persuasive power of great art. Without sympathy there can be no persuasion. Even a caricature, however cruel, must acknowledge the humanity of its subject in order to be funny. The artist must create a whole character and not simply show the side of him that will most convince us of his villainy.

The trouble for the political artist begins when he assumes he does not need toopponents opponants sympathetically because he's right and they're wrong. Since his audience agrees with him, why should he bother. Because, Terry Teachout says, not to do so is to rob the work of the artistic creativity that allows it to impact the audience. No one likes to be preached to, even if they're in the choir. Mr. Teachout observes the mistake these soapbox artists make too often:

What I find striking about much of today’s political art, by contrast, is its unwillingness to make such acknowledgments. Instead of seeking to persuade, to change the minds of its viewers' it takes for granted their concurrence. It assumes that everyone in the audience is already smart enough to hate Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, George W. Bush, and thus does not need to be reminded of their underlying humanity, or of the possibility, however remote, that their intentions might be good. By extension it also takes for granted that no truly creative artist could possibly think otherwise, that good art is by definition liberal (or, to use the term commonly preferred by such artists, '“progressive' in its view of the world, and that only progressive thinkers are truly creative. Conservatives are generally thought too repressed or narrow-minded for creative activities.

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It isn’t just that they [the political artists] feel no responsibility to make arguments that might prove persuasive to those who disagree with them, or at least haven’t yet made up their minds: they no longer acknowledge any responsibility to their audiences. They appear to believe instead that so long as an artist thinks all the right things, he need not go to the trouble to be amusing, subtle, or even interesting. All he need do is make his characters say the right things, and he’s entitled to the approval of his enlightened brethren. No one else matters.

I'm not surprised that political artists, who tend to be liberal, overplay the sympathy of their presumably liberal audiences. Clearly, there must have been an astonishing group-think of commiseration Satanthe great-satan reelectedidiot was relected in 2004. Perhaps heartbroken artists thought they could soothe their hearts--and line their pockets--with their fellow broken-hearted political compatriots. The problem they forgot is that their compatriots did not check their elite tastes at the door simply because they were pissed off at a second Bush term.

The larger problem, however, remains the university. A strange culture continues to materialize there. Professor, many of whom appear never to have left an academic institution, profess many of the politics that they developed as students under professors that themselves lived similar professional lives. Since the sixties, the political bend has turned quite radical at a higher level than perhaps existed before. The real trouble, though, was the rise in popularity among the professoriat oMarxistmodernism, marxist-criticism and literary critical theory helpmates such as deconstruction. Suddenly, art simply existed as a means of political expression. Instead of remaining a discipline in which an artist creatively revealed a truth about life or the world, art became the medium of a message. Thus, the border between art and propaganda came crashing down. Along with it fell that mystery that allowed an audience to sympathize with radical other characters, even if they disagreed with said characters.

Once again, the determination to make the person the center of all things--and, in the case of political art, the political perspective of the proper person--results tragic destruction. Theater-goers miss an opportunity to see a play that provokes a new way for them to see the world. A playwright finds the fruit of his labor withers on the vine before he's made even his expenses back. Somehow, the worship of self leads us to Nothing. Everyone loses.