How bad it can get

If you are ever in doubt about how bad things get when the arts and politics get too cosy, check out the list of the World's Ugliest Statues on the website of Foreign Policy magazine.

I am not saying that the arts and politics don't mix. They do. The arts cannot exist outside the realm of politics. Nothing can. Politics - understood as the process of organising human co-existence - influences, shapes and regulates all human activity on level or another. The only way to exist outside the filed of politics is to move to the proverbial desert island and to live there on your own.

Looking at many of the statues on the Foreign Policy list, it is tempting to think that a lonely island in the middle of nowhere might be a good place for a lot of overtly political statues.

The war of the arts

What do war and the arts have in common? They are both capable of fostering that amorphous thing called 'national identity'. Countries around the world use the commemoration of military events as rallying calls that serve to cement a single dominant national identity. And arts and cultural policies around the globe almost all include a line about how the arts foster that same national identity. So national
Identity is supposed to consist of shared memories and myth-making about past military exploits mixed with some deep-seated pride in our arts. Sport is the other big ingredient. 

Why are arts and cultural commentators so keen to embrace such company? Do we really think that artists are motivated by a desire to 'create for the fatherland'? Is their greatest go to defend the artistic homeland against invasion? Yes, there have been artists who espoused nationalist views and there has been no shortage of politicians who have exploited the work of artists for political ends. But the art of nationalist artists is not usually any good as art. And in fact much great art has come from the spring of international exchange. Crude nationalism is the enemy of good art.

Image: John Singleton Copley, The death of major Francis Pierson 6 January 1781, 1783, Tate Gallery      

Memory and art

Bernhard-Henri Levy recently wrote an article on the 'real and potentially dangerous revisionism' of films such as Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. Levy notes that 'the truth is that Nazism is becoming a new playing field for the amusement of the bad boys of Hollywood' and that 'Art comes out on top. Not memory'.

The delicate balance between 'memory' and fictional narrative is one that has always been at the heart of the storyteller's calling. Homer's Iliad - written around 2800 years ago - tells of the great Trojan wars of the ancient world. We will never really know what happened so long ago, but we can safely assume that Homer had his allegiances and his prejudices that shaped his account of history. Shakespeare was also a great 'revisionist'. Or did you think that Henry V was a balanced and factual account of the battle of Agincourt?

Art is not science. History does its best to serve 'memory', art does not claim to do so, nor should it be required to. Tarantino is not a documentary filmmaker. Slowly the people who personally experienced World War II are passing away and our 'memory' of it is becoming entirely 'mediated'. It is formed entirely by books, films, site visits and the education system. This is a natural process that has also happened to every war and major historical event. Time marches on and the events of the past become the stuff of fiction. In an age old process, memory and narrative become one.

Image: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

More equal than others?

Tonight (US time) the latest round of Academy Awards will be announced. The Oscars are one of the biggest events on the annual international arts calendar. But why?

There are a number of answers. The film industry sees the decisions of the Academy as markers that each year slightly readjust the celebrity hierarchy. An Oscar not only boosts the earnings of the current crop of films. It also tells the studios who is hot for the next round.

For cinema goers, the Academy's verdict acts like an arbiter of good taste. It not only tells us the films we ought to have seen, it also confirms our own taste if the films that we like are also those that the Academy's experts give their stamp of approval.

The role of this kind of authoritative approval in contemporary culture is full of contradictions. Traditional authority in the form of the university professor talking down to us about the virtues of renaissance art is out. Experts talk about a democratisation of the arts occuring. Postmodern relativism told us that everybody's opinion on what made art good was equally valid. But our enormous adulation of the Academy Awards (and the attendant opportunity for some celebrity worship) shows how reliant on expert validation we remain. Clearly, while our opinions are all equal, some are more equal than others!

Photo: Stephen McKay

Rammstein off to Belarus after all

Recent media reports indicate that the German band Rammstein will after all be allowed to appear in Belarus. The Belarussian Ambassador in Berlin has assured the band that the concert will go ahead on 7 March and has passed off the proclamations of the Public Morality Council as "private opinions".

Belarus bans Rammstein

Belarus has banned the March concert of German rock band Rammstein. The band is currently on a sell-out European tour and was scheduled to play in Minsk on 7 March. The nation's Public Morality Council found, however, that the band promoted "homosexualism, masochism and other deviations, cruelty, violence and obscene language" (see here).

The band has never been afraid of controversy. Its songs often pick up on controversial current social themes and treats them with irony and satire. Rammstein's latest album - Liebe ist für Alle Da - includes a song about the Fritzl case, that of an incentuous father gained worldwide attention for imprisoning and raping his daughter who he kept locked up in the cellar of there home in Austria. But the band's sense of irony seems to have been lost on the moral watchdogs in Belarus.

In a delicious irony of its own, The Public Morality Council invokes Belarussian traditions of "anti-Nazism" to further justify its anti-libertarian position against the band and its music. Too bad that its language and thinking is so redolent of Fascism, but all the better for we connoisseurs of irony!

Let's start really communicating

The world today faces many challenges, just as every other generation before ours has. And one of the biggest challenges we face is how we talk and write about the challenges facing us. 

We are surrounded by communication. But the quality of the communication we practise today has sunk to such a low level that poor communication itself has become one of the biggest challenges we face. 

Our public discourse has become burdened with meaningless motherhood statements, hollow rhetoric and evasive generalisations. In our attempts to avoid accountability and responsibility we hide behind untestable platitudes and trendy jargon marinated in evasive drivle. This kind of communication has become so prevalent in the public sphere that we have created a parallel universe, happily divorced from life's harsh realities. 

These realities call for a radically different language. We need  clean, direct and honest language if we are going to have any hope of dealing with the very real challenges we face. Let's drop the double-speak. Let's find the courage to make genuine committments when we enter the public debate. The alternative is a trip to Hell in the proverbial hand basket of sickly platitudes and motherhood statements!