ART OBJECTS: So on Monday night I heard Terry Teachout talk on “The Problem of Political Art.” I should have taken notes, but I didn’t; I’m lame. Because of the lack of notes, I can’t give you a reaction to the substance of his talk, just a series of scattered points. So here goes.

1. I went away from the talk more convinced, not less, that political art is possible. I’m defining “political art” the way Teachout sometimes seemed to define it: Art that makes the audience leave the theater, or put down the book, or close the CD case, wanting to do something about a current political question. Sometimes Teachout seemed to think that this action-oriented art was “instrumentalized,” opposing art to politics and subordinating the former to the latter, and so it was bad. Other times “instrumentalized” seemed to basically mean “propagandistic”: manipulative, appealing to the worst in human nature rather than the best. But those aren’t really the same definitions. Politics, ideally, springs from ethics; which springs (am I wrong to use the singular here?) from metaphysics. There’s no escaping politics. Some things in life are really entirely wrong or right, and if you try to show a believable world you have to at least acknowledge that part of the architecture of the world is its moral architecture.

2. So I came up with two rules for political art–that is, art about contemporary, pressing, controversial political issues. a) All characters must be actually human. No caricatures. No straw men. No predictable villains.
b) The work–at least if it’s a narrative work, like a novel, a short story, a movie, a comic, or maybe also an opera–should show how political issues derive from and hook into ethical, metaphysical, and, ideally, also aesthetic issues. In other words, if you’re writing something that can fairly be described as a play against the death penalty, that’s fine. But show us how the death penalty relates to broader ethical questions of responsibility, like the nature of justice, or free will vs determinism. If you can, suggest how the death penalty relates to metaphysical questions (to what or to whom are we responsible? what does the nature of justice tell us about human nature?). If it works, shape the narrative’s structure around the points you want to make. (For example, if you want to show that “responsibility” can be understood as loyalty to particular people or to principle, you want to shape your narrative such that one character has the first kind of loyalty and another character has the second.)

I think this sounds a bit formulaic, and I don’t mean it to. Presumably political artists want to make political art because of something they (…we) have actually seen or experienced. There are then two necessary things they must do: Go back to the source experience, and look carefully at the particular people and situations involved, so that you can portray the unpredictability of lived human experience; and figure out your core philosophy, so you can know what counts as a distillation of life and what counts as a dilution of life, which gestures are telling and which are red herrings.

3. My problem with Shaw, as a playwright, is that his plays basically read like Platonic dialogues. And while part of the point and poignance of the dialogues is their dramatic structure, that doesn’t actually make the dialogues successful as plays.

4. This is bouncing off something Teachout said: Conservatives tend not to create political art because the kind of energy that, on the left, is invested in politics–that sense that here we are approaching the heart of things–is more often, on the right, poured into religion. The “Four Quartets” are maybe Eliot’s “Angels in America.”

For my part, I do find that even my stories that are in some obvious way about politics (mostly abortion–I find I write a lot of stuff that is in one way or another pro-life) are mostly really about the grappling match between God and man.

5. Professionalism, in e.g. journalism, is a tradition; and like many traditions, it’s a way of transforming a necessary subordination into beauty. (The subordination in this case is that of the newcomer, the rookie.)