Are Artists Naturally Conservative? A Few Thoughts

In his extraordinary study Mammonart Upton Sinclair declared that "the path to honor and success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of the ruling classes," with this not only a matter of "entertaining them," but "teaching their subjects and slaves to stand in awe of them"; that artists more readily walk that path because their very "sensitiv[ity]" makes them even more susceptible than most to the propagandizing of authority that they in turn join in, making them creatures of "snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition," exemplified by how "[e]very little tea-party poet . . . cherishes a strong and cruel dream" such as Nietzsche, Carlyle, Kipling offer.

One thus gets an impression from this that artists are natural conservatives--quite at odds with popular images of artistic radicalism. Of course, as Sinclair makes clear exceptions abound--exceptions which commonly pay the price for not "playing the game" as demanded of them--"hero artists and martyr artists, men who have produced what they believed to be the best, in the face of obloquy, ridicule, starvation, even the dungeon and the stake."

Still, looking at popular culture, and not least Hollywood's movies, it seems to me impossible not to be struck by the relentlessness of such work in glorifying the wealthy and powerful, and validating the order that has made them so; and to think that if some artists become heroes and martyrs, this is the default mode for practitioners of the profession, or at least those which manage to get recognized as artists at all--a very different thing from the far larger set above which we can put the label "Artist."