| | Do you see this as being as true of our present culture as of that of Socrates or Van Gogh? From my experience, our culture seems to be rather less hostile to those who challenge cultural norms than that of earlier eras—I commonly hear people praise works of art with phrases like “It makes you think” or “It makes you look at things another way.” The DaVinci Code, for example, is a book about which I hear these things, and it's sat at the top of the bestseller list for something like a year now. (Of course, I haven't read it, so it might just be mass-appeal pulp, but that's the evaluation of it that I hear.) Also, artists who might have gone unrecognized in another era have a lot more resources available to them today—publishers and printers are far more accessable to the common man than ever before, not to mention the even greater power of the Internet. Now, I don't doubt that your familiarity with the more artistic side of our culture is greater than mine—do you still see artists today dying the death of Van Gogh, or do you believe that our culture has progressed? Msr. Leseul-
I think our society has progressed in degree- I don't doubt that, especially in that there is now a broad cultural left instead of a small Bohemia, and a 'counterculture lite' sympathy among many not-so-enthusiastic bourgeoisie. And that's a good thing. But the main centers of moral authority remain locked down fairly tight. I know many people- not all of them gay or lesbian by any means- here on the West Coast who left the East Coast (which Californians seem to think includes the South and the Midwest) because they just felt choked for life where they came from. I am one of them.
As for dying the death of Van Gogh, I speak very seriously when I say a culture that punished creativity and enthusiasm destroyed the spirits of most of my college friends, who were all humanities or liberal arts majors. Here in San Francisco, I've known artists who literally became homeless after they couldn't make anything with music or painting. I also know for a fact that a great number of sex workers are simply women trying to support an art habit. True, I don't think this is a horrible thing in itself, but the majority of sex workers see the Life as a terrible last resort, and only become neutral-positive towards sex work after turning out.
People joke about the career options available to liberal arts majors, but they don't really think that behind that joke lies the horror of what sometimes really does happen to those who blindly or not take the risk and invest their life in artistic passion. Sometimes, they make it. Sometimes, they don't.
In fairness, it really doesn't help things that the areas of the countries most culturally tolerant are also those areas which are most economically moronic. There would be far better prospects for artists if the liberal economic controls here in California didn't choke up and skyrocket the price of the supply of jobs and housing.
What, furthermore, do you see as the solution to the historical mistreatment of artists? Do you believe it requires changes to our sociopolitical institutions (i.e., capitalism, which is the typical scapegoat), or to our cultural expectations?
Well, I would essentially say two things would be helpful:
1) Politically, the promotion, socially and economically, of a libertarian polity. This will allow a wealthier society with more money and leisure for the appreciation for the arts, reduce the labor required for an artist to sustain her- or himself, increase the venues for economic self-support for artists, and end direct and indirect state persecution and marginalization of alternative lifestyles.
2) Culturally, it means opposing the bourgeois or Protestant Ethic, which is really a form of altruism or mixed spiritual altruism and economic rationality. The Protestant Ethic holds that joy for its own sake is guilt, work for work's sake an inherent virtue, utility an unquestioned god, luxury a suspicion, and respectable integration into family and nation, a necessity. Corporate conformism, sexual repression, the sex-gender system, heteronormativity, familialism, authoritarian religion- these all constitute the moral order vaguely called 'family values' which, under pro-sex feminist theory such as that of Ellen Willis, is the essence of patriarchy. Patriarchy defines the essential unit of society as not the individual, but the nuclear family, and entrusts to it the control of 'untrustworthy' desires and impulses as the basis of civilization. This is what generates antagonism to art and free-spirited thinking above all, and we need to uproot the moral, social, and institutional structures that define the patriarchal system, in the name of that aspect of that individualism which should demand moral sanction for desire, as egoism demands moral sanction for interest.
Also, I'm glad that you bring up the name of Steven Mallory, since The Fountainhead pretty directly addresses these issues—and the position taken by Rand there is that even in a hostile culture, an artist who maintains his integrity and refuses to make compromises with that society—who chooses, even, to suffer in labor at the quarry instead of living on the terms of that society—will ultimately be successful and recognized by those who matter. Then why does today's Objectivism glorify those who do, like Peter Keating, choose to live on the terms of our society, and why does it not expect to find the Howard Roarks of today's world in quarries?
I honestly think a more realistic rendering of the Fountainhead would have seen Roark fight a neverending struggle that never really succeeded, and I certainly never found the jury's vindication at its conclusion believable.
But let me set this aside- I myself am finding life more benevolent that I once thought possible- by the grace of 'those who matter'. Let me ask, what would the doctrine that poverty is guilt say to a young Howard Roark or a Steven Mallory?
And again, we don't live in the free society Rand portrays in the Fountainhead. How many young artists have their lives destroyed after being sent to prison on a marijuana charge? We live in the society of the housing project- and the police station- that is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
my regards,
v
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Jeanine Ring )O(
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Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
