You've Got Your Politics in My Art!

Politics' imperial cultural ambitions

Brian Doherty | October 27, 2006

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And maybe that's all right, for me and for others. Looking askance at the politicization of art and culture—whether by segments of the audience or the culture makers itself—has its own built in complications and ironies. My attitude about the topic is certainly driven by my own libertarian ideological predilections that value those areas of human life beyond the endless, tedious games of power and privilege, of ginning up a supposed "national will" and imposing it on all of us, good and hard.

Ultimately, if I value the meta-libertarian principle of human liberty to use the materials of culture and the world for their own freely chosen ends, perhaps I ought to celebrate even the most tediously side-taking versions of cultural criticism—like this list of movies right-wingers are supposed to hate based on political causes to which their creators donated—as an example of our freedom as cultural consumers to seek our own happiness through seeking our own meaning through, in, and among the stuff of human culture.

A grim and blinkered insistence that you can only feel comfortable with art that is "on your side" means unnecessarily delimiting one's own moral imagination, as conservative godfather Russell Kirk might put it. But hey: the work remains untouched by anyone's interpretations of it; the songs of Bob Dylan remain what they are, no matter what I, Sean Curnyn, or even A.J. Weberman says about them.

Having meditated on the politicization of art without a conclusion that any ideological orientation can wholeheartedly embrace, I find myself trapped in my own little wall of smug, noting that, like that notorious "erotic politician," showman/shaman Jim Morrison, the politically obsessed—left, right, or libertarian—are afflicted with wanting the world, culture and all, and wanting it now. I can't help but cheer any artistic, or audience, impulse to not give assent to the political over the artistic, even if it means admiring politicized art in the face of a libertarian impulse to reject it.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason and author of Radicals for Capitalism, will be out early next year from PublicAffairs.