Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [64]
Liberal institutions and the power elite, from the media to museums to the universities, determine who is permitted to dominate these specialized fields. The wider society, conditioned to rely on the specialist—whether in finance, politics, or art—for its interpretation of reality, is fed approved assumptions. And this system is perfectly designed to reproduce itself. Universities, by demanding that professors attain doctorates, almost always written on narrow and obscure specializations approved by faculty committees, replenish their ranks with the timid and the mediocre.
The artist, like the specialist or the professor, is plugged into a system where he or she serves the interests and tastes of the power elite. The choice may be between high and low culture, but in each sphere members of the liberal class dare not risk losing their prestige and employment by defying the structures of power. Playwrights end up writing inane television scripts. Graphic artists draw and animate for corporations. Actors pay the rent doing commercials and voiceovers. Filmmakers, editors, and writers sell themselves to corporate advertising agencies. And those on the upper end of the cultural spectrum, the tenured professors and cultural critics, the lauded poets and art historians, speak and write only for one another like medieval theologians. Artistic expression, like scholarship, is sustained by a system of interlocking, exclusive guilds. And those who insist on remaining independent of these guilds, such as the documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman, are locked out. Those who write, think, paint, film, or sculpt in ways that defy the specialists or the demands of commercialized mass culture must break from the institutions run by the liberal class.
Alan Magee, whose powerful images and sculptures of war and physical abuse explore the depravity of violence, entered the Illustration Department at the Philadelphia College of Art in 1967. He had no special interest in illustration. The department, however, was a place where art students were permitted to make representational paintings without apology. Fine-arts departments throughout the country, leaning toward the abstract and conceptual, saw representational art as by nature illustration. Those who gravitated to representational art were usually pegged as illustrators.
“As an art student I was searching for a language within the realist tradition that could carry contemporary ideas and issues,” Magee told me.11 “Surrealism provided one example of how representational art could communicate. I looked carefully at Magritte, and also at George Tooker, Philip Pearlstein, and the Canadian painter Alex Colville. Three paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—Salvador Dalí’s [Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)], Jan van Eyck’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, and Andrew Wyeth’s Groundhog Day—set me on my path as an aspiring illustrator.
“Outside our classrooms, inspiring work was beginning to appear in magazines, on posters, in European graphics,” he said. “There was a lot to look at, to admire and measure oneself against. The magazine and book publishers were, by today’s standards, inventive and politically courageous.