Art Carny

Has it ever been noted that true artists are, by and large, against the society in which they live? Surely someone has, though it's never come to my notice. Afterall, an artist is someone who has something to say, or at least someone who believes he has something to say. Afterall, a content and happy person does not feel the need to trumpet this from the parapets. It also explains why artists are more likely to be of foreign birth or background than the law of averages would suggest. Indeed, some of the greatest were such people. (Joseph Conrad leaps to mind.)

Even those who would be considered 'reactionary' and 'conservative' show this tendency. Saki cast a withering light England before World War I; Mencken deflated the dreams and aspirations of American society of the teens and twenties so well that his name was used to scare babies; P.G. Wodehouse preferred to write about a never-was England that had been found only on the stage; country and blues musics are purely American musics in tang and spirit, but were created by people so marginalized that they were outsiders in their own native lands.

Does this view hold up in modern America? It would certainly seem to. Most artists, or at least people with artistic pretensions, lean so far to the left that it's a wonder they can stand up straight. This should be no surprise, really, since these days most patronage of the arts is done by fleecing the taxpayer, who thinks Haydn was an olympic gold medal skater and Picasso a fetishist web site. Thus, the artist would be against people who work for a living and pay their own way through life and take care of their own family. They live their lives without the help of government timeservers ... indeed, in spite of these people. These people are the antithesis of modern leftist "thinking" which so many alleged artist embrace, so there may be something to this.

At the core, of course, artists are businessmen with wares to sell. Though the true artiste would create regardless, most who earn their living from their art cast a hard eye out for a dollar. If their patron is the government, they shall espouse government control, just as those in more imperial days glorified the empire which patronized them, and earlier American artists praised the millionaires who supported them or The People who tossed them nickels and dimes on the street. Today, to be a true artist, one would have to stand up and denounce government bureaucracy ... a likelihood on the order of finding a sensible political activist or an honest lawyer.