Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [67]
Shetterly’s portrait series of radical Americans, from Sojourner Truth to Cindy Sheehan, called Americans Who Tell the Truth, have been held at arm’s length by the media.
“I call lies lies, not differences of opinions,” Shetterly said. “I call war crimes crimes, not mistakes. I call complicity of the media in lies and crimes just that. I point out that there has been, and is, frequently a profound antagonism between democracy and capitalism.
“Part of the bias against art of conscience in the art world comes from a serious belief that art has something to do with affirming our deepest humanity, our sense of beauty, our spiritual connections, our finest aspirations,” Shetterly said: Political art may call us to argue, be divisive, when we should be meditating. Shouldn’t art be a refuge, a place for persistent reflection on the finer things? It is my belief that art should be, and can be, many things. If it is about beauty, it must also be about truth, even when that truth is ugly and anathema to the beautiful and powerful. A beautiful still life is never, in a certain sense, irrelevant. But if the survival of human life is in jeopardy, maybe it’s important that some artists explore why with all of the urgency and truth that they can bring to bear.
“It’s curious that we live at a time when ‘art’ is often described as literally anything the artist or the critic says it is,” Shetterly said. “The media accepts this definition . . . except when the art’s political.”
“When we think about societies and civilizations of the past, what do we know about them?” Carol Becker asked.We know them through their art, which is what endures and communicates the given psyche of the people at that time. When we look at art, we realize that the ideas we’ve taken from it define Western civilization, yet we devalue the place of the artist. We don’t see what they do as legitimate, or even hard work. Take the art work of South African artist William Kentridge. He lived and created works during the apartheid years. He had this ability to shift and pivot the world at a time when no one wanted to confront or question power. So often artists are the ones who go into difficult situations. Doctors and others go into difficult situations in communities, too, but they don’t make representations of those situations that transform how people see the world. All I’m saying is that I want artists to feel they could take leadership in the world, not that their work will simply be relegated to what we call “the art world.”13
“To train someone to operate a lathe or to read and write is pretty much education of skill,” C. Wright Mills wrote in The Power Elite:To evoke from people an understanding of what they really want out of their lives or to debate with them stoic, Christian, and humanist ways of living, is pretty much a clear-cut education of values. But to assist in the birth among a group of people of those cultural and political and technical sensibilities which would make them genuine members of a genuinely liberal public, this is at once a training in skills and an education of values. It includes a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one’s knowledge of one’s self; it includes the imparting of all those skills of controversy with one’s self, which we call thinking; and with others, which we call debate. And the end product of such liberal education of sensibilities is simply the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman.
It is the ability, denied to the specialist, to turn personal troubles into social issues, as Mills wrote, to “see their relevance for his community and his community’s relevance for them” that should be the culmination of artistic and intellectual vision. Many trapped in mass culture are “gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source.” And it is the task of the artist or the intellectual to “translate troubles into issues and issues into terms of their human meaning for the individual.