Why the Arts Suck These Days

 

The arts in general have been moribund since the mid-seventies. If you ever wondered why, the answer is simple. They declined as “political correctness” rose, now metastasized as “cancel culture” and “wokeness.”

The imagination must be free. It cannot judge or play politics. It must seek truth. But since the mid-seventies or so, everyone has had to walk on eggshells, think carefully before saying anything. Truth is dangerous.

It becomes too dangerous to say anything new. You cannot predict who might take offense at what; and end your career, take away your livelihood. The safe thing is to do only what has been done before. And so the arts become bland and monotonous. Mere mindless entertainment, at best. One song sounds like another. One film looks like another. One novel reads like another.

But even this is not enough, either. The Overton window is a moving; one must then add something to virtue signal, to be truly safe—throw in a trans character, make the hero black, and so on. And make sure they are entirely admirable, without human flaws. Condemn the groups you are currently supposed to condemn: the Jews, Southern whites, the religious, men. Making the product even more shallow and predictable.

And unethical; just as good art must insist on truth, it must also insist on morality. Yet these current productions are obviously small-minded and cynical. You feel dirty watching, or reading, or listening.

 Artists must do this, editors must do this, producers must do this, gallery owners and art critics must do this. Or have no career.

Any good art must be suppressed immediately as dangerous.

Suppressed not only by the galleries, the publishers, the theatres; also on the Internet, where independent producers might otherwise shine through.

Humour is perhaps the most obvious example. Any good joke requires a surprise, a reversal of expectations. That becomes too dangerous in the atmosphere of political correctness. It is safest not to try to be funny.

And everyone can see the result. Whatever happened to Mad magazine, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, Monty Python?

That was the Sixties, and the early Seventies, when almost all the arts were blossoming.

 Blossoming because there was an atmosphere of anything being permitted. This was, notably, just as the old pornography codes had been lifted, on movies and TV; and the Supreme Court had struck down much other censorship. Moreover, the speech codes of the McCarthy era had just been discredited.

Result: a great flowering of the arts.

You can trace similar periods throughout history.

We need another burst of freedom. We are overdue. And I feel it is about to happen. People are chafing at the absurdities of wokeism. Major figures are bucking it, and seem to be starting to break through rather than being ruined.

Such eras of repression are mostly sustained by general cowardice. As Solzhenitsyn once said of the old Soviet Union, if any one person had resolved to get up one morning and only speak the truth, the whole structure would have collapsed. An exaggeration, but it is generally true that evil by itself is powerless: what is needed for it to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

If it falls, when it falls, it will collapse quickly, and there will be a great flowering of the arts. I hope soon; I hope I live to see it.