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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.
Perhaps we're heading off in the wrong direction with Thomas Kikade and little cottages with docks on the lake to hang in the bathroom. Liberals are meant to be cutting edge individualists, but the telos of Conservative art is Mount Rushmore. There isn't a shortage of good small time traditionalists, making retablos and icons and Native American beadwork and oil paintings of the Grand Canyon and bronze sculptures of elk and so on. That's all fine, it has a thriving market. Now we have better and better image generation programs, and can make more attractive images than we know what to do with.
The big issue is that conservative American artists are all just doing their art alone, in their own small studios, maybe selling it at a local gallery or a craft fair or something, and it's hardly ever brought together to make something grand. Even conservatives themselves are probably too shamed to commission something like Mount Rushmore at present.
If you really want to see a political entity promoting some Conservative Art in Current Year, there's the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces (no, really, if you haven't see it, take a look https://youtube.com/watch?v=zYfdVnGHVEE ) Excellent details, craftsmanship, lighting, chanting -- very beautiful.
What would you be interested in seeing America build? We're unlikely to build a grand cathedral at this point. The Washington National Cathedral is quite nice, and I wouldn't mind more of that; is that what you're looking for? If you get a chance, go visit Saint Anthony's Monastery near Florence, Arizona. It's worth it just for the gardens, which are good conservative art in their own right. I want to work on a giant mosaic of Saint Innocent of Alaska or something. But Americans are too idiosyncratic. We end up with a bunch of eccentric individuals making little versions of House on the Rock instead.
When American conservatives are doing well, they end up with things like the Milwaukee Natural History Museum, the San Juan County Historical Society Mining Heritage Center, parks and plazas with life sized generals on horseback. Utah has good parks, museums, civic buildings, and at least a couple of pretty cool cathedral sorts of things. If I were Head Culture Commissioner of the Right, I would ask for more formal gardens with attractive shrines, and more things to be built from stone and carved from wood, with formal mosaics embedded in them, with spires and domes. I would absolutely not commission more little paintings of dockside cottages and Precious Moments figurines, the market can handle that just fine on its own.
I agree with your idea here. Although I also want more grand neoclassical style paintings as well. It would lead to creation of great art if we had more people around trying to emulate Jacques-Louis David and follow in his footsteps.
What about stories, what stories would you promote?
I agree that this is a serious issue. How would you go around to changing it?
Yes, I wouldn't mind seeing more of those kinds of paintings in public places.
There was an interesting conversation between Jordan Peterson (caveat: I do not endorse some of his recent move toward establishment American conservatives and selling gold... but his old Jungian lectures on The Lion King and Pinocchio are excellent) and Jonathan Pageau. Previously he had been working on carving traditional icons, and has recently started working more on retelling traditional fairy tales. I will be interested to see if anything comes of it. The best conservative storytelling of the last century is that of the Inklings, because it's legible to children, but still rich enough for adults. But I don't get the impression the current system is built to allow professors enough slack to sit around at pubs talking about their imaginary worlds for 20 years.
I'm not sure about grown up stories. I think it's more useful to think of excellent stories than right wing ones. The best American fiction is probably Faulkner, as much for his prosody as because of the stories. Or entirely for that, and his use of specifically American culture, since half the time I couldn't tell what the story was when I was reading him. Dvid Foster Wallace had so much talent, but inanition to being more left than might be ideal, I and those I know have only succeeded in reading his essays, not his stories, because they're even more convoluted than Faulkner, as far as I can tell. It's fine when someone writes nonfiction or Based on True Events pieces well, like Solzhenitsyn. I've heard good things about Tom Wolfe, though I haven't managed to read anything by him, despite trying a couple of times. Same with Flannery O'Connor; I tried, but just don't get it. A lot of intellectual conservatives including in my family think she's great, though.
So that was all the 40s and 50s, mostly. Then things have stagnated for about two generations. People have been reading terribly written self help books like "The Purpose Driven Life" and political dross like "The Democratic Party Hates America." I read Brandon Sanderson novels because at least he writes novels, and doesn't just give up half way through. It seems like the thing to do is lean into our local subcultures and inherited religions more. Unsung is lovely, if insufficiently edited, in a similar trippy way to Charles Williams. I would still recommend it to rightists of taste, regardless of differing politics, because it isn't about narrowly defined politics, but about Heaven and Hell and whether to world is made up of math or not, like all good stories. It would be great if he could find and talk with someone who could write Tom Wolfe style satire about Bay Area tech people and blockchain stuff. I'm unhappy that the current model is to dribble thoughts out on Substack, and would like more compilations and stories. I don't know how one would go about encouraging this, not being oneself able to produce anything much in writing.
I don't know. If I knew I would have learned Byzantine mosaic and be working away at it already, since this is something I've been interested in for a decade. Instead, I watercolor plants in my garden and make felt quail, like everybody else. I've learned the basics of encaustic (the medium used for the Christ Pantocrator of Sinai icon), but have neither training in how to progress past embedded leaves and accretion, nor anything to do with the pieces when they're finished. My mother had a lot of artistic potential, but mostly just painted and scratched some egg art, then gave up because she didn't have anything in particular to do with them. A man came to my school district to do a workshop with the art teachers about retablo once. He was self-taught, since the art form had mostly died out in the early 20th Century, but he was motivated to work on painting cultural connections to his ancestors and religion. It was great, we all loved it, but it took over a year to set up, then we don't actually know what to do with the information afterwards.
There's a church being built in town. I should probably go there and see if there are any iconographers about. They had bells cast, and now have a bell tower set up, and have presumably trained or are training a bell ringer (https://youtube.com/watch?v=faa5TZtnfzc). Perhaps there are things going on that I could participate in? And also because I miss church, but have stopped going on account of life circumstances and changes in my favorite parish. But also, my kids are too little just now, I'll probably have more bandwidth in a few years, and can take them to learn traditional arts too.
Absolutely agree about Peterson. He's at his best when talking about Jungian stories and archetypes, and getting into the idea of perception needing a structure of value that is outside narrow scientific and 'rational' frameworks.
That icon is beautiful, and thanks for calling out the method. My girlfriend really likes to sew and knit, do you know any icons or methods that are made in those ways?
Not iconographic, but just saw this rather impressive thread artist https://www.ceciledavidovici.com/
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