If Artists are Conservative, Why Do We So Often Picture Them Otherwise?

Recently writing about the politics of artists I discussed Upton Sinclair's view of artists' "sensitivity" leaving them vulnerable to the propaganda of the day--and David Walsh's perhaps not dissimilar view of the artists' working methods (unconscious, intuitive, emotional, impressionistic, centered on the concrete image, as against an analytical approach), with this reinforced by "Bohemianism, individualism, egotism," were prone to leave them running behind their times politically, and indeed susceptible to reactionary agendas.

Yet our stereotypes are different, and it seems worth asking why. One possibility is that we are seeing artists through the eyes of that sort of person prone to exaggerate the political difference between themselves and anyone who disagrees with them--in this case, of the conservative who exchanges words with one mild liberal and feel themselves besieged by extreme leftists. Still another is that the aforementioned Bohemianism of artists, their flouting society's standards, etc., make them seem more leftish than they really are to people who do not inquire too deeply into their attitudes. However, there is also the possibility, or even likelihood, that those "hero" and "martyr" artists make a greater impression than the astutely career-minded artists who play it safe, producing what their patrons require of them. Certainly their life stories appear more dramatic, which may have something to do with this--but one can also argue that they make a contribution out of proportion to their numbers, a Theodore Dreiser, for example, making a far greater mark on the culture than a Booth Tarkington precisely because he challenged rather than affirmed the conventionalities of his day.

In turn one might argue that, given the way artists so often run behind the times, it may be that periods in which there is something other than orthodoxy touching on their sensitivities--in which, perhaps, there are great popular movements afoot--produce more than their share of such artists, and thus more of those who ultimately produce something that endures. Returning to the case of Dreiser, the early twentieth century which produced him (and figures such as Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis, and Jack London, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck) can seem such a period. By contrast the years since the Depression and World War II have been very different--with the stream of such thinning out to leave us with little but a reactionary postmodernism. The result is that where a century on Dreiser, if unloved by the literary establishment ("treated like a 'dead dog'" in Walsh's words), retains his stature as one of the century's greats a century after An American Tragedy, those who are the toast of New York today are likely to slip into the same comparative obscurity as a Tarkington.