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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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The right wing should do patronage of good culture and right wing culture and abandon an ethos of disengagement and libertarian ethos.

Why?

Because if you know artists, they care first and foremost about doing their things and getting money and recognition. The reason the left has been so successful its because it is willing to provide support, and to deprive them for not aligning with them.

Secondly, people who are actually on your side will also act based on incentives.

And thirdly, because the end result is desirable. A culture of just whining, about leftist cultural output is impotent. There is nothing wrong with complaining about what is bad, but you should also promote what is good. We need a society that promotes good art and and good culture. There is more to life than line going up. And if you don't try to fill that vacuum, someone else will.

What this means effectively? A right wing goverment should defund leftist artists and promote rightist artists and allow people to join the side. Soon you will discover that many artists are actually rightists who were afraid to express themselves.

It also means promoting art programs.

Also some kind of art tends to be of a more negative and leftist form like rap and modern art. Not all but more commonly.

Beyond the goverment, right wingers and not leftists should care more about networking to promote art that isn't left wing. It doesn't have to be explicitly political. Lord of the Rings for example qualifies. Just accurate adaptation of great classics of western literature without left wing ideological blinders would also qualify.

Putting regulations in place to make them illegal or underpromote far left racebending art and make them less financially viable, and giving incentives for art that respects the source material for example.

Of course, someone could object to a certain particularly aggressive moves in terms of what you promote and not promote, and in being excessively far to the right and excessively intolerant. And I could even agree with them in some cases.

However, in the current status quo, things are so lopsized in the direction of the left that it is pushing the culture landscape in a more pluralistic phase to have less race bending far left culture being promoted and more right wing.

This means that more right wing patronage of art is good even from a more neutral, pluralistic standpoint. Which is a general pattern of the culture war, even outside art. If someone is fine with leftist domination and escalation then a position in favor of an impotent disengaged right makes sense. We don't have a sufficiently neutral and moderate status quo though for defence of the status quo to be the neutral position.

The entire art world, root and branch, all the institutions and nearly all the artists, is left wing. There's nothing on the right to subsidize.

The entire art world, root and branch, all the institutions and nearly all the artists, is left wing. There's nothing on the right to subsidize.

What makes you say this? There are plenty of artists out there that aren't leftist, they just aren't as well known. The show 'The Leftovers' had a very distinct religious/right wing bent, as has been discussed here.

There are excellent right-wing writers on Substack, like N.S. Lyons, among many many others. There are beautiful depictions of angels from a relatively classical stance (although I don't know the particular political views) like the Angelarium.

This sort of blatant and knee-jerk negativity is foolish and defeatist. It's a major reason why your values continue to lose. Conservatives of the past fought evil regimes when their children would be beheaded as a consequence, you can't bother yourself to fight against leftist art?

What makes you say this?

Observation. Art schools are leftist. Art criticism is leftist. Art museums are, by and large, leftist -- only tempered by the inclusion of centuries-old art. Artists get praise and praise each other by producing leftist art. Or often enough art that is meaningless garbage but which the artist ascribes a leftist message to. It's a set of institutions even more throughly captured than the university system.

Then it's time to do the hard work of creating an alternative set of schools, critics, museums, etc that have different values, if those values are what you care about.

Chesterton, on his time attending art school (the Slade) in the 1890s:

In this chapter, the period covered is roughly that of my going to an art school and is doubtless also coloured by the conditions of such a place. There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature. Moreover those who work are, I will not say the least intelligent, but, by the very nature of the case, for the moment the most narrow; those whose keen intelligence is for the time narrowed to a strictly technical problem. They do not want to be discursive and philosophical; because the trick they are trying to learn is at once incommunicable and practical; like playing the violin. Thus philosophy is generally left to the idle; and it is generally a very idle philosophy. In the time of which I write it was also a very negative and even nihilistic philosophy. And though I never accepted it altogether, it threw a shadow over my mind and made me feel that the most profitable and worthy ideas were, as it were on the defensive. I shall have more to say of this aspect of the matter later on; the point is for the moment that an art school can be a very idle place and that I was then a very idle person.

Art may be long but schools of art are short and very fleeting, and there have been five or six since I attended an art school. Mine was the time of Impressionism; and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism. The very latest thing was to keep abreast of Whistler and take him by the white forelock, as if he were Time himself. Since then that conspicuous white forelock has rather faded into a harmony of white and grey and what was once so young has in its turn grown hoary. But I think there was a spiritual significance in Impressionism, in connection with this age as the age of scepticism. I mean that it illustrated scepticism in the sense of subjectivism. Its principal was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow. In one sense the Impressionist sceptic contradicted the poet who said he had never seen a purple cow. He tended rather to say that he had only seen a purple cow; or rather that he had not seen the cow but only the purple. Whatever may be the merits of this method of art, there is obviously something highly subjective and sceptical about it as a method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all. The philosophy of Impressionism is necessarily close to the philosophy of Illusion. And this atmosphere also tended to contribute, however indirectly, to a certain mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon me; and I think upon many others.

Hmm I should read Chesterton. Still working through Lewis at the moment.

This won't work, because it plays to the other side's strengths. First, you'll have to somehow create all of that without including any of the people who know how to do such things (or only including the few who were booted for their insufficient leftism -- but even those are probably too left). Second, even if you do, you'll have to avoid them infiltrating and converting it, and they're really good at that. "Build your own art world" isn't quite as far out as "build your own international financial system", but it's pretty far out there.

Well then find some artists and people who are already good at things, and convince them your values are right. They won't magically lose their skills and abilities because they change political views.

Conversion is asymmetric too; it nearly always move left. To no small degree because the institutions which can convince are in the hands of the left. By the time an artist is actually known they've been steeped in leftism for so long you're never going to move them out short of a religious conversion experience.

Then figure out why conversion is asymmetric and figure out strategies to match it. If those don't work, analyze your failures and go back to the drawing board.

Your fatalistic argument of 'no matter what we do we already lost' is tiresome in the extreme.

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