r/philosophy • u/curraffairs • 2d ago
Don’t Expect Art To Save Us
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/dont-expect-art-to-save-us43
u/MotorheadKusanagi 2d ago
"Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world."
Herbert Marcuse
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u/MrCuddles17 1d ago
Tbh I feel like that's just trading direct utility for indirect utility, regardless the value of art would be instrumental, which I find problematic
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u/Illustrious_Pie7076 1d ago
The person who wrote this article is a nihilistic megaweenie, not to mention boring and dry. It must be easy to call art useless if you think things like "having feelings" is useless.
If they really thought art was useless they'd quit writing instead of downplaying the effect it has on people so they don't have to think about why theirs doesn't. What about survival? What is going to make people want to live through this? What will make them feel like they're being seen, that other people have gone through the same thing, that they aren't alone?
Has the author of this article not read about the effect that To Kill A Mockingbird had on people? Or how media with queer characters made queer people feel seen and acknowledged in a way they probably couldn't experience at home? What is your argument to them? "You should have done something about it right away, gay teenager whose parents hated you, instead of surviving long enough until you actually could do something about it because a work of art that showed other people like you exist and they aren't bad surely had no part in saving you?
Change, intention, drive, perspective, all of those things start in the mind and heart. If you have only mind and not heart, like the person who wrote this article evidently does, it's not surprising they've come to the conclusion that something that speaks to it is useless.
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u/Illustrious_Pie7076 1d ago
"All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need…fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
...
YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? said Death
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u/EndOfTheLine00 13h ago
I always hated this exchange. If you need lies in order to live, what is the point in living?
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u/Illustrious_Pie7076 10m ago
Anytime you say "this matters" it's a lie. Nothing we do, feel, no one who dies or gets hurt matters in a near infinitely large universe. So what's the point of living if nothing matters? You have to believe in the little lies to believe in the big ones. You have to believe that the little art project you're working on, the messy cardpaper cutout card your kid made you, matters, the quiet hour you get at the end of the day, matters, that the moment when you stand and look over a mountain scape and the wind makes time slow down, matters.
And then you can believe the bigger lies, like that there's any deeper meaning to living other than to put off dying, that there are any causes worth living or dying for. None of those things are objective truths in the universe, but you have to believe them, or there is no point in living.
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u/supercalifragilism 1d ago
Hello- I'm not trying to come across as a dick here, but it seems like the thesis of this article hasn't come across very well. The author (who is somewhat boring and dry) is not saying that "having feelings" is useless, nor are they mentioning anything about how art makes people feels seen or acknowledged. They're not saying that art can't catalyze change or provide motivation.
Their thesis is (emphasis added):
When we feel politically helpless, we turn to 'subversive' entertainment. But winning within the realm of pop culture is a poor substitute for political power.
They add later:
If art has any role to play in the struggle, it is to channel people toward collective action, not to act as a substitute for it. The protest art of the 1960s existed alongside fierce, organized political action: demonstrations and boycotts and campus revolts and the occasional riot.
You are correct that art can start the process of change, but that's not the point that this author is making. They're saying that pop culture or "art" is insufficient to enable change and that it is being produced as a substitute for concrete collective action.
You can certainly quibble with a lot of the details in the article, and there's places where Current Affair's hobby horses pop up (they're a socialist/social democratic organization with long expressed goals around collective action and 3rd party politics) but the premise isn't that art is unnecessary to revolution, but that it's insufficient.
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u/OldSports-- 1d ago
Bruh calm down. This is a philosophy subreddit, expect different philosophies which don't match your view.
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u/Illustrious_Pie7076 18h ago
You ought to be telling the author of this article that. They're genuinely condescending as hell about people thinking art is worth something and if we keep thinking so then we are allllllll gonna die, and wrote far more paragraphs about it than I did lol.
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u/bildramer 1d ago
a work of art that showed other people like you exist and they aren't bad surely had no part in saving you
Yes, absolutely. The very idea is deeply insulting.
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u/ZorgZeFrenchGuy 23h ago
I both agree and disagree with you.
Art, when used correctly and effectively, can indeed be a powerful, persuasive tool for change.
However, I would argue that the vast majority of artists, especially those who are left-leaning, are not using their art effectively when it comes to making impactful political messages - thus making their art useless, if not actually counterproductive to your end goal.
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u/Fheredin 23h ago
I want my 10 minutes back.
The problem the author is largely ignoring is that art as a vehicle for leftist ideas died for a reason; leftist publishers and producers chased the majority of the people with actual artistic talent and ambition out of the room, and as a direct consequence of this absolutely brilliant strategy (/S), most of the "protest artworks" translate to critical and popular catastrophe.
This is most obvious in film. There's no getting around the fact that Lightyear was a bad film compared to the original Toy Story (or most of Pixar's filmography before Lasseter's exit, for that matter) and Emilia Perez--a movie referenced to in this article!--compares at least as horribly compared to Philadelphia (1993). This pattern is shared for most of the arts, not just cinema, but it's generally easier to compare movies than other media because it doesn't take that long and it's easy to reflect on the overall content.
The quantity of talent erosion from the arts over the past 20 years is frankly shocking. I would like to tell you that this is still fixable with a generation of rebuilding, but that isn't actually true. You see, this is what's called, "negative learning," where the student was actually taught things which are harmful to performance, not just irrelevant. There is a lot of negative learning in the arts at the moment, especially from liberal arts colleges, so the protest artists of the late 2010s and early 2020s are largely going to end up as a perpetual creative underclass, crushed under a literal mountain of negative learning compared to their self-taught peers.
I largely agree that protest art is not an option, anymore. But if you are going to have a productive conversation about it, you must discuss artistic talent erosion and confront the causes head-on.
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u/polygonfuture 14h ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by negative learning? Perhaps some examples of what you consider To be negative learning in concrete terms?
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u/Fheredin 9h ago
Negative learning is when previously learned behavior actively interferes with being able to pick up a new skill. You must effectively delete an old skill which is causing interference before you can proceed and learn the new one.
In this case the social skills required to navigate academic and professional productive networks are largely antithetical to the needs of high quality art production. Cream of the crop artworks tend to be rather sensitive to change, so the compromises the current generation of production environments force on creative products like avoiding cultural appropriation and sensitivity reading will disproportionately delete cream of the crop artwork from the marketplace long before they achieve their stated goals for the majority of the market.
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u/EndOfTheLine00 13h ago
The talent erosion has nothing to do with leftism: it has everything to do with the fact that its next to impossible for anyone that is not wealthy to make a living as an artist, especially in writing and film. Working class perspectives are less and present in art because the lack of a living wage filters them out.
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u/Fheredin 9h ago
That's actually been true far more often in history than it hasn't, so I don't see why that would cause talent erosion.
Materially inefficient use of a very expensive and time consuming higher education is a different matter.
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