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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.

First, define "good art" because we've been having this conversation for centuries and nobody's got a working definition universally accepted. What is "good" art - technical merit and ability? subject matter? what the public likes versus what educated taste likes? And is "good art" art in "good taste"? What's good taste, then, precious?

Artists are about being transgressive, challenging social and cultural established values and thought, novelty, and all the rest of it. You can't pay them to produce 'conservative' art, and those who do so will be and are derided as sell-outs. Think Thomas Kinkade, who certainly had some measure of talent, deciding to make himself into a brand and churn out product on carefully selected themes that were repeated ad nauseam. "The Painter of Light" who was wildly successful with the public and made a fortune, but he's never going to get the respect of the art world.

Think of Tracey Emin versus the Stuckists.

STUCKISM Founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson in 1999, Stuckism is an art movement that is anti-conceptual and champions figurative painting.

Charles Thomson derived the name from an insult by the Young British Artist, Tracey Emin, who told her ex-lover Childish that his art was ‘stuck, stuck, stuck’.

They may have started out championing 'traditional' painting, but they've become another sub-set of the performance/protest artists of modern art.

(T)he group continues its confrontational agenda, demonstrating against events like the Turner Prize or Beck’s Futures which, the movement argues, are among a number of art world events controlled by a small number of art world insiders.

'Good art' is not going to be given that accolade unless it accedes to the values of the liberal and indeed progressive strain of cultural hegemony. "Norman Rockwell type art" is not intended as a compliment. Is Marcel Duchamp's urinal good art? I think Surrealism did produce good art and it did give a shock to the art world, which every new movement needs to do, but as tastes and values evolve, there's no going backwards.

I think for me, most of it would be down to technical skill and the ability to communicate a message to the audience (without having to explain it). What I love about the really good old classic art in various media is that it’s technically good. Old Renaissance paintings are master works that are made by people with a good understanding of how to draw, how to arrange things in the painting, light, shadow etc. old plays are well written and well placed, they show rather than tell, they communicate with their audience and so on. And I’m not against all modern art, I like some of the surrealist stuff personally. The stuff that bugs me are the technically bad, thoughtless, and often requires the artist to make up a meaningful title and backstory for their art because absolutely nothing in the piece communicates any sort of meaning.