Artists, get ready

Artists, get ready. If America is beginning to look like what we fear it might, it's the artists who get us through the dark periods and help us endure what we can't endure.

We don't like artists in the USA, we don't understand them, we never had all that much use for 'art' rather than 'entertainment.' Sure, we honor a few, but so often we've treated our artists like shit, particularly the good ones. We make it impossible to work at their best because they're too busy having to get an audience interested in their stuff to do the damn work. And so often, even if they get an audience interested, it's by pandering to their very fickle tastes and never doing the work they want to do. Even if you count rock stars and movie directors among our greatest artists, and if they're good enough there's no reason not to, how many of them created cosmically great art their whole lives long the way Michelangelo and Rembrandt did?

We barely let our entertainers be more than one-hit wonders, but think of how many of our great American artists did one great work, or had one great period of a few years, then sauntered on as a shell of what they were, sapped of the ability to create as they used to because they encountered so much resistance along the way. Now imagine how many artists you've never heard of. Many of them did some great works that you'll never experience, even more of them were deprived of the ability to work with their best selves. How many American artists can you think of that got the opportunity to do a whole lifetime of work that fulfills their potential and continually evolves with new influences, new techniques, new insights? I know more about this subject than most people I know and my list would probably be around a dozen; maybe two dozen if I'm being charitable.

But, paradoxical as it seems, great art thrives in times of troubles because that's when audiences are most receptive to it. Art thrives on ambiguity like double meanings and subtle implications that audiences can spend a lifetime parsing and never fully understand. If the audience is receptive enough, they pick up on every implication in the work then add a few of their own.

Obviously, art can't much thrive in a totalitarian state where everyone is in danger of going to jail for treason (though it did in the Soviet Union until they all were killed off), but art can and has thrived in dysfunctional, repressive states where censorship is rife and we are desperate for people to tell the truth about what's happening, even if the truth has to be told slant. If art thrived anywhere in American history, it was in the African-American community. Why? Precisely because they were limited in the truths they could speak, and had to find creative ways to say the unsayable.

When politics ceases to work, that's when art has to.All reactions