Not long ago I went to a recital at the Kennedy Center in
Washington by the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, a lovely woman with
a lovely voice whose renderings of little-known pieces by Rossini
and the French composers Cécile Chaminade and Reynaldo Hahn were
revelatory. The near-capacity crowd in the KenCen’s 2,454-seat
concert hall were wild about her and called her back at the end of
the performance for several encores. As artists sometimes do, she
took the occasion to chat with the audience, wondering if perchance
President Obama might be present (he wasn’t) and inviting the
audience to share her joy in the recent triumph of Egyptian
idealism in Tahrir Square, Cairo. She mentioned that she had kept
up with events on her musical tour of American cities by watching
TV news on CNN and MSNBC — but “not much on Fox.” This got a roar
of approval from the audience as did one or two other things she
said indicating her liberal sympathies and disobliging opinions of
conservatives and conservatism.
About this, the reviewer for the Washington Post had
this to say: “In a field that so often seems to exist in a rarefied
atmosphere away from the world, she has the directness of a pop
musician — not to try to impose any kind of political message on a
program, but just to remind everyone of the world of which
classical music is a part.” And, annoying though I had found Miss
DiDonato’s remarks to be, I could see the reviewer’s point. For
there’s no denying that “the world of which classical music is a
part” — not to mention the larger world of artists and
intellectuals of which it is itself a part — is in its sympathies
and presuppositions overwhelmingly liberal. Or perhaps more
precisely, anti-conservative. That is why this adorable songbird,
born in Prairie Village, Kansas, and an alumna of Wichita State
University, was able to assume that political views which might
have come from the New York Times would be gratifying even
to (especially to!) an audience in Washington where, as the whole
world knows, a horde of new Republican officeholders had recently
arrived.
It’s no news that nearly all artists, like much of their art,
are now overwhelmingly of a leftish persuasion. That is why
classical music and “progressive” news organizations like National
Public Radio go so naturally together — and why, also, the newly
arrived Republicans in Washington have put Public Broadcasting on
the chopping block. The broadcasters are worried, too, and have
deployed, as they always do, “the Muppet lobby” to try to hang on
to their taxpayer bucks. My local PBS and NPR outlets have been
running frequent announcements setting out the damage the GOP
proposals to defund them would do — not to them but to me. “These
cuts will have a devastating effect on WETA and the television and
radio programs that you and your family rely on,” the announcement
goes, detailing programs “like Masterpiece,
Mystery, Nova, and the PBS NewsHour. Do
your elected officials know how you feel about funding for Public
Broadcasting? Call your representatives in Congress today and let
them know where you stand.”
This statement must have been cleared by the station’s
undoubtedly very competent legal counsel, for at no point does it
express a political point of view or advocate a particular
political action, which would not be allowed. It merely urges
viewers to make their views known. But of course the folks
at WETA can be pretty confident about what those views are likely
to be, and that they coincide with their own on this as on other
matters. Like Miss DiDonato, public broadcasters know their
audience and can assume a community of interest encompassing
political as well as social, artistic, and intellectual
matters.
They know, as Sam Guzman of the Christian Science Monitor
recently wrote, that “conservatives have abandoned the arts.” It
may be, he admits, that “conservatives are better arguers, but
liberals are better artists. I am not specifically referring to
either fine art (if there remains such a thing) or popular art. It
doesn’t matter: Liberals control both. They have MTV, but they also
have the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. They have Rolling
Stone, but they also have the New Yorker. They have
Hollywood, but they also have Cannes.” So far, I’m afraid he’s
right, but I think his explanation for this sad state of affairs is
mistaken. “Liberals,” he claims, “understand that rooted deep in
the human soul is a love of beauty, a fascination with story, and
an intangible sensitivity to the singing of songs. That’s why
liberals have sought to control not only the Senate, but the
symphony, the storybook, and the silver screen. Reason is a blunt
instrument. It can smash with all the force of a hammer, but it is
art that subtly serenades and seduces.”
Fair enough, you may think, but what has the love of beauty or a
fascination with story got to do with most of the art, fine or
popular, now being produced? His example of the art that subtly
serenades and seduces is James Cameron’s dreadful blue 3-D
nightmare, Avatar, which, though he correctly identifies
it as left-wing environmentalist propaganda, he finds “persuasive,”
at least to the illiterates — his word, though he doesn’t mean it
in a bad way — who flocked to the movie in their millions. I doubt
how persuasive this movie really was, even to the relatively
limited and mostly pre-voting-age audience to which it primarily
appealed. The point is not that the other side is winning through
the power of its art. Actually, in the postmodern era art has
become more political while becoming less persuasive — partly for
the same reason that Miss DiDonato knew she could bad-mouth Fox and
be applauded for it: because the artists know their audience
already shares their opinions. Art has pretty much renounced any
pretension to power along with its pretension to verisimilitude,
and its new fantasy-land is cut off not only from reality but from
those of us, including most conservatives, who have refused to join
them in flight from it.
No, the real point is that we have no contemporary art of our
own but have to share that of the other side for the sake of what
poor nourishment we can derive from it. At any rate, that’s what
generally strikes me about post-1960s movies that are said to be
“conservative,” like the Mel Gibson vehicles Braveheart
(another movie with blue people in it), The Patriot, or
The Passion of the Christ, which are in my view hardly to
be distinguished from the brain-dead claptrap of Avatar — as I
like to think conservatives would know if they hadn’t given up on
the movies years ago and so got out of the habit of critical
thinking about them. What pathetic crumbs from Hollywood’s table
now satisfy us! If we conservatives can’t do any better than that,
maybe we’re better off without any art of our own.
BUT WE CAN DO BETTER — with the stipulation that, where we do,
it will be not as conservatives but as those in touch (as liberals
so seldom are anymore) with a world outside and above politics. The
best conservative movie I’ve seen for a long time was made by a
young Frenchman, Xavier Beauvois, who identifies himself as a
socialist and doubtless would repudiate with vigor any imputation
to him of political conservatism. The movie is Of Gods and
Men (Des hommes et des dieux), and it tells the story
of the Cistercian monks of Tibhirine in Algeria who were kidnapped
and murdered by Islamicist guerrillas in 1996. Such a story
obviously has an enormous potentiality for political
interpretation, but apart from a mention by an Algerian official —
a self-discrediting source, as the movie itself shows — that he
blames French colonialism (which ended in 1962) for the insurgency
M. Beauvois (Le Petit Lieutenant) is not
interested in things political. Instead, he gives us a portrait of
piety and martyrdom the likes of which has not been seen in an
English-speaking movie, so far as I know, for a generation.
Interestingly, the reviewer for the New York Times,
though he liked the movie as much as I did, felt the need to
reassure his own liberal audience that the movie was not really
about Christianity but “rather an almost fanatical humanism” —
which is a contradiction in terms if I ever saw one. He tries to
find in it some kind of statement about “the sins of colonialism,”
presumably to justify his own approval of what he has seen. But
don’t be fooled. There is no such thing, nor is it true to say that
“the theme may be piety, but Mr. Beauvois and his cast do not
address it piously.” The community of interest of those who read
the arts pages of the New York Times, which must overlap
to a large extent with that of the audience in the Kennedy Center
the other night, may be reliably anti-conservative, but the art
that, for want of anything better, they worship, can never be so if
it is to remain art at all.
