Why is the arts so hostile to conservatism?

[David]

When it comes to society as a whole, the Right are hardly oppressed. Most of the newspapers have stridently right-wing agendas, and both major parties lean conservative nowadays. Pauline Hanson copped a pretty easy ride on commercial TV through the 2000s in a way that would be unimaginable for anyone even slightly left of centre.

Yet when it comes to cultural institutions – universities, the arts, Hollywood, popular music – the reverse is true. You can't see a conservative for miles, and I get the vague impression that any right-winger who raised their head would be immediately chased out with pitchforks.

I guess we've all heard the standard explanations for stuff like this – conservatives tend to think more with their heads, progressives more with their hearts, and creativity gels more with the latter approach – but a) I'm not sure that's actually true, and b) even if it is, is that the whole story behind the lack of right-wing artists?

It seems absolutely plausible to me that right-wing would-be artists experience a 'glass ceiling' of subtle discrimination and ostracisation in arts communities. If so, it would make sense that it would either be pushing them into pursuing entirely different fields to begin with or else, once they're there, putting them in an environment so hostile and inhospitable to their beliefs that they will be far less likely to get to reach the peak of their disciplines.

As a leftist who also cares about art, I would see such a result as a bad thing for two reasons (besides the fact that people's work should be judged on its merits and that discrimination on any other basis is unjust). Firstly, art should represent as diverse a field of human experience and thinking as possible – it's possible that, by not having many politically conservative artists, we're missing out on the different ways of thinking and working that people with more right-wing mindsets might have. Secondly (and more self-servingly), in maintaining a safe little bubble where everyone slaps each other on the back and never fundamentally disagrees about anything, we ensure that the rest of the world becomes more right-shifted. If anything, we need fewer left-wing performance artists and more left-wing economists, businesspeople, newspaper owners and bankers! I'm just not sure how such a shift could occur.

Does anyone else agree?

[Pies4shaw]

"What do you think we should do?"

"I think we should write a song about nothing changing. Because nothing happening is intrinsically interesting"

"OK. That'll be good."

"What chords should we use?"

"Same ones as last time."

[Mugwump]

An interesting topic. Firstly, it is a fairly recent phenomenon. Many, indeed most, of the great writers of the first half of the twentieth century are broadly on the right - Kipling, Eliot, Yeats, Larkin, Conrad, Faulkner, Conan Doyle, Ted Hughes. DH Lawrence. Probably Thomas Hardy. There are many exceptions - Orwell, Auden and others - but the overwhelming tenor of poetry and prose writing up until about 1960 is on the right. after that it switches. So it is clearly nothing to do with leftism being intrinsically about change and this being essential to the creative act. Good writing, or composing, works happily with any material. Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson and the incomparable genius George Eliot wrote within, and about, worlds that were tightly bound with convention. Arguably they produced great work because of that.

there are of course great right-wing novelists today - VS Naipaul and (I suspect) Kazuo Ishiguro and Saul Bellow and Tom Wolfe would qualify as challenging the leftist orthodoxy, and being well-lauded for it. However, since the 1960s two things have happened which I think make Rightist art much more difficult. These are (1) the collapse of objective standards and a clear critical centre ; and (2) the fact that most serious writing (and other arts) is mediated and promulgated through the state-controlled university system, and these are overwhelmingly monopolized by Leftists. The state, and the Left, has effectively socialised the appraisal of literature. I think this was a project of Marxist intellectuals following Gramsci, and they found fertile ground with the consumerist cult of youth that emerged in the 1960s and the Vietnam War's effect on American youth in particular. Where America goes, most follow.

Great art is never merely Left or Right, of course, because these are very crude filters of perception and thus hostile to good art. But there is clearly a kind of anarchy of standards that suits the Left, since the Right tend to start from the position that tradition matters, and accordingly most public artists are nowadays inclined to pontificate from that viewpoint.

Finally, I suspect that most artists aspire to be regarded as supermen, above the ordinary run of humanity. It's in the nature of the beast. In the first half of the twentieth century, in the half-crushed aftermath of an aristocratic age, this led to a fashionable elitism. In the second half, in a more democratic age, the only way for an artist to assert their superiority to the common man or woman is by being "transgressive", and acting as a kind of cultural vandal, damning the existing order and asserting the right to judge and condemn the ordinary people who are attached to it. This, of course, suits the Left far more than the Right.

As you may expect, I regard this as a tragedy for our culture, but we are where we are. The Fall of Rome. The future belongs to China, which knows what it values, is confident in its culture and authority, and will defend both.

[Wokko]

A Conservative can have the second highest rating show on a network then get shitcanned after saying he went to Trump's inauguration.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/05/16/tim-allen-stunned-blindsided-last-man-standing-cancelation/

[swoop42]

They're to busy shooting things like deer, road signs and black people to produce art.

Get with it David.

[Pies4shaw]

[HAL]

How did he get to Trump's inauguration?

[Tannin]

[stui magpie]

I'm staying out of stuff here I know nothing about and sticking with stuff I know a little about.

So in response to the OP, I daresay there are plenty of centre/right students at uni, just not ding arts courses and generally keeping their heads down within the social scene.

Engineering, sciences, medical and law (even though that's a version of an arts degree?) would all have a population of less left than average uni students.

As far as left wing artists goes, if you want to make a living as an artist there's any number of ways to get the skills other than going to a university, which is nowdays a glorified vocational training institute. If you want to be an actor, you try to get into NIDA. You want to play music, you practice, improvise and learn. If you want to write books or poetry or plays, going to university to study it would have to be a sign you should choose a different career path.

You also need talent to start with.

Left wing businessmen? I'd argue that if you look at a lot of the wealthy people, they may not qualify as socialists but once they've made more than enough coin for themselves there's a lot who really get into philanthropy. Twiggy Forrest is a recent one, Bill gates is a great example. If gates just gave all his money to the worlds poor, 2 days later they'd be no better off and he'd be broke. Zero positive impact. Instead he has a foundation that funds things that change lives on a permanent basis.

[Tannin]

[stui magpie]

You can argue about how they earned it, but can you legitimately have a complaint about how they're spending it?

[Tannin]

They didn't "earmn" it. they stole it. One from businesses and consumers around the world, the other from you and me and every other honest taxpayer.

Legitimately complain about how they are spending it? Well yes. At least in Bill Gates' case. One of the things he is funding with his millions is a program to mutilate little African boys on entirely spurious fake-scientific evidence that it reduces the incidence of AIDS. (Which it does not.)

There was another scandal about Gates' funding some other anti-social project too, but I've forgotten the details already. Doubtless you could look it up if you are interested.

[David]

[Tannin]

Phillistine! You obviously don't know that tax avoidance is the greatest art of all.

[Tannin]

Time I attempted a proper answer, rather than just picking holes in Mugwamp's one or telling Stui he's got it wrong. Let's try a few observations and see where it leads us.

1: Artists are intelligent and (in general) educated. Most conservatives are towards the lower end of the IQ scale and poorly educated. This isn't prejudice, it's a fact, and a well-known one. People with a university education are much more likely to vote Labor or Green in this country, and similar studies show much the same thing in other Western countries. This is not to say that there are no intelligent or well-educated conservatives. Here on Nick's, for example, Stui is intelligent, Jack Spain is well-educated, and Mugwamp is both. Nevertheless, conservatives are, on average, not very bright as compared with normal people.

2: Art is the act of seeing something about the world in a different and insightful way, and communicating that vision to other people. All art does that: anything that doesn't do that probably isn't art. Conservative thought isn't insightful, and it certainly isn't new. I'm not saying it is impossible to create art from a conservative mindset, simply that it is very difficult to do so.

3: Current art (in any age) is mostly just glorified fashion. It's all about the latest trends and the most outrageous attention-seeking behaviours. This is something conservative-minded people tend to be not much good at. (Later on, we look back at the art of last year or last decade and start to sort out the 1% gems of inspiration and preserve them, meanwhile throwing away the other 99%, which tends to be ephemeral dross.)

4: Until about 30 years ago, nearly all educations involved a good deal of social awareness. Even if you studied accounting or engineering or dentistry, you almost certainly did quite a lot of history or language or politics or sociology or psychology or media or geography. Most people got a fair stab at a good, rounded education. These days, good little conservative sproglings go direct to law or accounting and major in Tax Dodging 101 without ever learning anything about the real world. Of course they are a bit thick and struggle to understand the second thing about art. (They do know the First Thing about art, of course, that there is a 150% tax write-off for certain forms of it.)

5: Don't fantasise that there is some sort of secret conspiracy to drive young conservative artists out of the industry. That's the sort of made-up twaddle that only a Herald-Sun reader could believe. The reason that there aren't many conservative artists is that there aren't many conservative artists. They are not bright enough and they don't think the right way, and they are too busy paying off tasteless McMansions and 4WD BMWs.

6: Art is essentially about human understanding and communication. It is a very personal, or I should say inter-personal thing. You can't write a great novel unless you are very good at understanding people and knowing what it feels like to be them. If there is one quality in this world which, by and large, conservatives are hopeless at, this is it.

7. Not everyone fits the mould. You get the odd conservative who is intelligent and educated (though you have to have a strange sort of mind to stay conservative for very long if you are those things), just as you get the odd reformer who is rather disconnected from other people and seems more like a natural conservative. Nevertheless, the overall pattern is clear.