Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
It seems like lots of artists and creatives are going right wing lately. I suspect it's due to their (or our, speaking as one of them) predisposition to stand against mainstream culture, as it's impossible to miss the mainstream/capitalist adoption of left wing ideology lately. There's just no excitement or energy in trying to champion leftwing causes when every leftwing cause has been coopted by mass media and tech giants (which are also criminally censorious to creatives currently) and wall street corporations. The artists and creatives who continue to work within the spaces of leftism are increasingly boring and uninteresting and creating work that parrots the capital line more than any genuine transgressive feelings within the artists' vision.
Anyway, my point in making this post is to ask if there has ever been a situation like this in the past? I am interested in history but it's not my strongest subject. It feels like perhaps there are parallels with the French Revolution: wherein the masses were increasingly disgusted with the nobles and quickly defected. I remember reading that even Louis XVI was criticized as being out of touch by vaccinating his family against smallpox, as an aside.
Looking at figures like the Red Scare girls and their whole scene, (which has spiraled out to include Kanye and tons of other millennial thinkers from MIA to David Rudnick) it looks like the disillusionment with leftism is huge. I wonder how much of this is actually an interesting signal that 20th century leftism is dead, or if millennials are simply getting too old for the naivety of that ideology and we're seeing a generation go more conservative which happens with every generation.
I fully empathize with people who are sick of the leftist chokehold on discourse and culture over the past few decades (culminating in the Trump presidency) but I wonder what it leads to. Optimistically, it seems like a "back to basics" situation where people are seeing the contradictions of the recent past and trying to correct them for a new, more coherent ideology, but I also feel like it's a bit of a bizarre situation when a class of people who basically banked their entire social capital for decades on progressive ideology and LGBT/racial inclusivity are starting to tear it down. I applaud it but when has this happened before? In a way it reminds me of the shift in European art from being purely religious in nature, funded by the church, to suddenly having wealthy private clients in the Dutch merchants of the late 1500s.
Sorry for the rambling tone of my post, I just like to read the things posted here and I wanted to kind of post this as a prompt to have some discussion to expand on some thoughts I've been having lately. As an aside, no one in the artist or creative scenes I frequent seem to be able to articulate this shift, as most are still afraid of cancelation or being put out of work or shunned by social media or deplatformed or the many other situations one can get into when defecting from mainstream opinion. Or alternatively creative people are not as invested in the specifics of politics as much as people here are and would rather not engage with the situation from a political lens but rather from their personal/creative artistic angle.
Which artists? And 'right wing' how? Ten artists on your twitter timeline going RW is different than, say, half all existing elite artists 'going RW' / a new cross-societal group of elite talented RW artists. Is there a RW riefenstahl today? Leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking? And how right-wing - is not being a brain dead liberal and reading Sowell enough?
Red Scare and their 'scene' did not cause Kanye to be antisemtic, or anti-left. MIA is barely a "thinkier". Idk who runick is, the first google result was ... ballotpedia?
Where's the New Right Eighth Edition celine, or pound?
To answer the question directly - artists have 'moved from left to right' a lot historically, and the mainstream RW artistic presence was, for most of history, way more prominent than it is now, and the movement you see is very small.
Artists/creatives ranging from the people I mentioned in my post to friends of mine who are not famous but are artists.
I don't know, as right wing as losing a billion dollars for antisemitism and talking about race science openly on a podcast, which in the grand scheme of /r/themotte isn't probably very rightwing but in the grand scheme of like, NYU grads, is basically literally hitler compared to ten years ago
Yeah, I see the mainstream elite talented artists as still being deeply left aligned, but the people with less exposure and fame diverging from that. I don't care if Yayoi Kusama or Jeff Koons goes right wing tomorrow because I don't care about their work. I care about people who have always made interesting work to me veering away from liberal ideology because I care about interesting work and seeing where it fits in the political spectrum.
There aren't even leftwing directors leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking today so I think asking for a rightwing one is pretty out of the question for now
Everyone in the NYC/LA fashion/art scene basically knows each other, Kanye is definitely getting exposed to these people and I've heard his rants where he explains that he thinks leftists/BLM are coercing the Kardashians into believing/saying whatever they want. If Patrik Sandberg/DIS Magazine people/Ryder Ripps/Azalea Banks/Red Scare girls/Walter Pearce/a handful of other people in the scene weren't all collectively looking into vaguely alt right ideology Kanye West wouldn't have any idea about it either.
She has a platform and a creative oeuvre and is daring to say something other than the democrat party line so I feel she's relevant to the discussion at hand
He's a talented graphic designer making interesting work, you spelled his name wrong
I don't know, I'm not claiming there is such a person
What are some examples of artists moving left to right en masse? Historical precedences for this, specifically? That's what I was curious to know about.
You may characterize the movement I see as small but I don't see the movement ending where it is today. It's gaining enough traction with enough tastemakers and cultural producers that are young enough that it could be the genesis of some broader right wing thing moving forward and that's what interests me, not really in just the small shift that's happened already.
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