The Artistic Non-Season

 This has been an absolutely glorious 24 hours, as glorious as life gets, but now that it's over, I'm suddenly very sad. This should be the beginning of the artistic season, and knowing you get to strap yourself in and experience humanitarian creations as miraculous as any scientific discovery is what gets me though the long and sad winter months. But there is no real artistic season this year, and 2 in 3 American artists are currently unemployed. Some things you can come back from, but there is no money or relief coming for a lot these organizations before January at best, and probably not for a while thereafter. Some illnesses are too drastic to recover from, and even if you make a partial recovery, living becomes so painful that one has to ask if life is still worth living thereafter?

This is not priority 1, it may not even be priority 100, in no way is the shutting down of the arts in America or even the world a political issue on par with coronavirus or global warming or potential war with China or Russia, but I refuse to feel bad about feeling bad about it.

America always took religion very seriously, and the arts was the best way the world ever came up with of pacifying the religious urge. The country clearly takes science very seriously, but whether people were of the right or left, embracing the wrong kind of science destroyed millions. And there's nothing America takes more seriously these days than politics, and how's that working out for us?....

Current America's a country that exists not just at political extremes, but at intellectual extremes. Americans seem to be completely in thrall either to the rationality of applied science, or in the irrationality of applied religion, and even after so much disappointment in the last generation, and in spite of a mountain of evidence forming in front of us to the contrary, the entirety of America still believes that through political solutions, once our point of view gains in power and influence, we can turn our dogmas into political solutions and make life better for everyone. And yet the more we believe in political transformations, the more distant seems the possibility enacting any political solutions.

If the last five years have proven anything, it's this: life does not get better. One way or another, it is meant to be failed. Whatever the details, it is meant to be a struggle, constant disappointment, constant anxiety, with long term hopes ultimately dashed, and every victory should be celebrated to the ends of time, because all victories are stolen from the jaws of defeat, and defeat is what awaits 99% of us far more than 50% of the time.

So the one intellectual pursuit that we, particularly as Americans, don't take seriously is those transitional humanitarian, metaphysical thoughts in the space between science and religion, eternally facing politics like an oppositional force. If we took the arts and the humanities seriously, we'd realize what artists have been telling us for thousands of years, that what gives life meaning is a series of conflicts, questions, goals, and longings, the vast majority of which are unresolvable, unanswerable, unrealizable, and unfulfillable. To believe that is directly in contradiction with the entire American ethos, and no matter what our political orientation, no matter whether we believe that America is (or was) great merely by virtue of being America, or whether we believe that America was never great, there is not a single part of the American political spectrum that isn't acting like stereotypical Americans who believe that with enough goshdarn effort, we can create the society we want. It's clear that our country can only let go of that notion with the greatest of difficulty, and it may take a price even now unfathomable to contemplation for us to learn the lies within that ethos.

The arts are supposed to be challenging, but the challenge is not necessarily inherent in its intellectual content or even its political content. A necessary work tells you what you don't want to hear. Today's generation of up and coming artists is absolutely correct that recently we've done a far too lacking job of afflicting the comfortable and that art could, perhaps should, have far more subversive political messages, but it goes the other way too. One of the most challenging messages of all in so much great work is that whatever our heart's fondest wishes, we will never achieve them, and we may be punished for pursuing them. Lear never sees peace again after he relinquishes the throne, Oedipus discovers the worst possible truth because he sought to alleviate his people's suffering, Anna Karenina never knows happiness again because followed her heart, Don Quixote can only feel fulfilled by going insane, Satan can only be happy by embracing his hellish role, Tristan and Isolde can only consummate their love through death, and Moses never reaches the Promised Land. Hell, the price for getting rid of the Lannisters was allowing Daenerys to sack King's Landing and burn it to a crisp.

We have our great arts in America, mostly popular arts, and the popular arts are great for all sorts of reasons and features. But they're popular for a reason, and that reason is not that they're not as sophisticated or as smart, or that the people who consume them hungrily are in any sense intellectually or morally lacking. All of that is self-evidently false, but the reason popular arts are popular is because the vast majority of the time, they ultimately give the audience what they want. Happy endings, well defined heroes and villains, short melodies. Obviously, that's beginning to change in recent decades, when superheroes turn into watchmen, and TV protagonists into madmen. But in a democratic society, so long as only a small minority consuming that kind of stuff against the vast majority still chasing unadulterated popularity, the American population is not learning much about life's ambiguities, and they're going to believe that the world rewards populism.

The only solution is, somehow, and I obviously don't know how, for more people to spend more of their time taking the humanities seriously. Not just to spend their time in political advocacy as so many millions of Americans do on social media these days, but in intellectual advocacy that grounds what they believe about how to practically make the world better. And that means not just reading the few writers who conform to what you already believe, but reading all sorts of writers who challenge you and make you mad. Reading fiction outside our preferred genre, reading political philosophy that isn't just the flavor of the moment, or god forbid, reading poetry, or god really forbid, reading conservative political commentary... Not just listening to the music that confirms to your niche or scene, but music that is very far afield from your cultural comfort zone - perhaps Fela Kuti and Um Khulthum on one side, Frank Sinatra and Ted Nugent on the other, and Bach and Ligeti on a third, literally entering the headspaces of people who believe completely different things about the world than you believe. Not just going to the theater for more Marvel and Star Wars, but finding the littlest known independent films, foreign movies, and documentaries that can barely get a showing in any theater, and god forbid, maybe showing up occasionally to a classics revival.

Some people would read this, if they're reading it at all, and call a steaming pile of bullshit: this has no conceivable impact on our lives! You're not going to be a better person because you listen or watch all this stuff! And the answer to that is, of course you're not going to be any better, but you're going to be more thoughtful, more skeptical, less easily swayed, because you're no longer in the positivist world of applied science. You're now in the humanities, where everything is vague, ambiguous, and contemplative, and while you're busy contemplating the world rather than acting, the practical world is left to be run by policy makers who have been studying their fields their whole lives rather than demagogic ideologues who so easily exploit people who believe in their politics with quasi-religious faith because their views are uninhibited by deep study except in texts approved by their movements. That's what it means to think freely, and that's also what it means to maintain a society where the population has the knowledge to not let the whole thing come crumbling down.

Over the internet years, the idea that people should be free to like what they like gained enormous traction. Back in the day, 'there's no such thing as artistic quality,' no such question as 'what is great art', occasionally you could even read there's no such thing as poetics, there's only the quasi-anthropological question of why people like what they like.' But after all that talk of artistic libertarianism, the populist internet idea: 'don't yuck people's yum' couldn't even be sustained for more than fifteen years before the very people who advocated for it rebelled against it, and replaced it by the idea that many cultural products people like are politically problematic at best. 'Don't yuck people's yum' is the artistic equivalent to libertarianism. The world of problematics and content warnings is a new form of artistic conservatism, and as with other forms of conservatism, it can have its place if truly used with the best intentions. But the humanitarian equivalent to liberalism is the world of cultural exploration, and this year, so much of the way the world explores the arts will not exist at all, and may never exist again. If people had patronized it enough in the past, there might have been enough money in the tank to guarantee things keep going, but now they all may die, people will never know what they're missing, and many more people may die with these artistic organizations which, believe it or not, might have saved them.