... but Amy Nelson-Mile has some info on World Theatre Day.
My humble contribution comes from Noel Coward (whose wonderful Brief Encounter Debbie and I watched last weekend): "The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda."
I disagree. If I may quote myself, in Boulevard last year I wrote that "propaganda can be artful, but it can never be art — for the simple reason that it can never really admit of ambiguity, let alone doubt." Think of all the satirical poetry that was written in the 18th century. Much of it is supremely skillful, but it's also as dead as the issues being argued. I saw Seamus Heaney's adaptation of Antigone in Dublin a couple of years ago. He seemed to me to have reduced to Sophocles to propaganda. Jean Anouilh, however, adapted the same play and while his adaptation clearly referenced the Nazis, it also transcended those references and remains a timeless play. Every work of art, every artist, has a point of view, but that does not mean every work of art must necessarily propagandize or be didactic. And I think they're better off the farther away they stay from doing or being either.
ReplyDeleteAll art is politics, all art is propaganda.
ReplyDeleteI don't think art is propaganda. Propaganda can use art to spin a tale or a picture in one direction or another. This could make it artful, but it doesn't make it art which to me is concerned with revealing timeless truth or beauty. The political issues of the day exist as background props, to give context to the human story being told or shown. If a work of art comes with an interpretation of whatever the current politics are at the time it is produced (or that the artist thinks they may turn into), it represents the artist's opinion. Opinion isn't spin. It is opinion. Propaganda is spin, the coloring of some of the facts with no requirement to 'believe' in what you are saying.
Politics and propaganda implies deception for personal or organizational gain. This is not the purpose of art which at its best finds and elevates the most beautiful expression of truth.
Also, some art is frivolous and beautiful without having political purpose. Look at a fine Persian carpet - beauty for beauty's sake.
Noel and I are pretty much in agreement on this, as the thread following this earlier post indicates: A night to cherish ….
ReplyDeleteI would never suggest that a work of literature ceases to be art because it addresses sociopolitical issues. But those issues have to grow organically out of the life depicted in the work - because art is about life, and only about politics insofar as poltics is a part of life.
You are a Platonist, Arthur - the Plato of The Republic. I am more of an Aristotelian - and hence inclined to insist upon sharper distinctions. The reason we have different words for art and politics is precisely because the activities those words refer to are not identical. Though I do think that Hal's rejection of Falstaff tells us something about politics that The Federalist Papers do not. Art, because it has to do with life, may at times touch upon politics, but life encompasses a great deal more than politics - and so does art.
ReplyDeleteActually, what Ockham said was that we should not unnecessarily multiply entities. He would have a low opinion of Daniel Dennett's recent book, in which Dennett counters some objections to his ideas by citing the possibility of multiple universes. Since there is no evidence for such, to introduce them into the argument is to unnecesarrily multiply entities. The popular understanding of Ockham's razor, however, is that, given two or more possible solutions to a problem, choose the simpler. (As you may have guessed, I spent a number of years actually studying medieval philosophy.)
ReplyDeleteWe may tend to think of propaganda in Cold War terms, as only that which is proclaimed through a bullhorn or on a billboard or in a brochure or a Soviet Realism sculpture or painting, whereas it can be any artist "telling lies" (the imagery comes from Richard Russo), in effect, to get you to believe something, whether the artist knows that is what is happening or not.
ReplyDeleteArthur, I really don't think spinning a yarn or telling lies can be done by accident. These are active pursuits and not art.
I liked Picasso when he showed promise before he became famous. He did a painting of his nanny which was just brilliant, an old woman with all the wrinkles and also great love. I don't care for his later stuff where everything he touched was art and brilliant like him, even if he only spent five minutes on it and it showed, but that's my personal opinion.
I have yet to read Russo, but what he says is not something I've seen in fiction writers I admire. Experience, imagination, opinion, yes, but not lying which really is something you have to consciously decide to do. That writers can have an opinion people don't agree with, even an opinion that is uninformed, doesn't make them liars. Again, opinion isn't spin. It is opinion. Propaganda is spin, the coloring of some of the facts with no requirement to 'believe' in what you are saying. I don't agree with the suggestion that all writers, without necessarily realizing it, are essentially professional liars.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with Russo's formulation is that it is an equivocation - because a liar may make something up and writers of fiction also make things up, writers of fiction must be liars. But liars do not always may things up. Sometimes they just don't tell the truth. And when they do make things up it is in order to tell a falsehood. The writer of fiction is not necessarily, as Russo would have it, substituting his own truth for THE truth. He may actually be trying to get at THE truth. I don't think that Orwell would have accepted the view of The Road to Wigan Pier as propaganda. I think he would have said that what he was advocating in the book was true. He had arrived at an opinion based on evidence and he was doing his best to communicate that, but he believed what he was communicating was true. To say that all art is propaganda is, obviously, to assert an identity between art and propaganda. Which would mean there is no good art or bad art, just good propaganda and bad propaganda.
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