David Walsh on the Politics of Artists

Not long ago I cited Upton Sinclair's remarks in Mammonart about the tendency of artists toward the political right in a way extending beyond mere careerism. There was, too, the artistic "sensitivity" that made artists susceptible to the orthodoxy of the day, and the impression of grandeur the rich and powerful strive to make.

As it happens, David Walsh has had some thoughts to offer here, going beyond mere artistic "sensitivity" and the ways in which it leaves artists open to such influence. He specifically suggests that an artist's way of thinking and working, with the unconscious and intuitive, with "sense perception, immediate impressions and emotions," so central, has them thinking and feeling in images, rather than analyzing philosophically and scientifically. Besides leaving them easily propagandized, this also leaves them responsive to irrationalist, anti-rationalist and subjectivist attitudes, with the tendency reinforced by a tendency to "Bohemianism, individualism, egotism." The result has been their running behind the times intellectually--and indeed highly susceptible to reactionary influences. Hence the appeal of Friedrich Nietzsche to so many artists in the pre-World War I period, and after, who, as "wrote scathingly about bourgeois mediocrity and complacency . . . criticized religion and Christian piety and slavishness . . . stood for the 'liberation of the instincts,' spontaneity, egoism . . . intoxication," and appeared "anti-Establishment" in a way that could appeal particularly strongly to those with rebellious impulses (against bourgeois conformity, certainly), while looking more "alluring and apparently 'poetic' than looking at the difficult, often harsh, often tedious conditions of the working class."