Form, Content--and Politics

As Upton Sinclair observes in Mammonart, "all art is propaganda." However, he also observes that there is an "Art of Beauty" and an "Art of Power," the former stressing form, the latter stressing content.

Why is that? If, as Sinclair says, all art is propaganda, why should not both lay equal stress on content over form?

For Sinclair the answer lies in who is producing the art. As he remarks, "[t]he Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are established and safe, and wish to be entertained," for it is an art of "pleasure in things as they actually exist," while the advanced technique involved in it shows that "the leisure-class artist has time to study technique, and knows what he wants to do."

By contrast those who are not established and safe and contented with things as they are, the "rising class" most obviously, when it has "risen" high enough to have its art, is more concerned with what it has to say rather than how, which is a big enough task with the creative process, reflecting the way in which that class is still thinking things out, "crude and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized emotion," and the artist, at any rate, unlikely to be leading the cushy life of the rich lord's well-cared-for favorite.

Once again, Sinclair seems to get a lot right with this explanation, but I still do not think he quite exhausts the issue. It also seems to me that the propagandist for those in power have an additional advantage connected with the fact that the message is clearer to them than for those struggling against the order of things, namely that it is clearer not just to the artist, but to their intended audience as well. The message is the same one that audience has been bombarded with all its life, and which that audience at least pretends to accept. One can be more creative with form when the audience already knows the substance of what you are going to say. Indeed, they may have to be so if they are to have any effect at all, because even an audience that accepts the message may have been subject to it so much for so long as to be desensitized to presentation of the idea as such. Subtlety can work, a hint will do when people know well what is being hinted at, and if they make it pleasing everyone will be impressed (all as, again, there is that premium on entertaining the comfortable).

By contrast those presenting a newer or at least less familiar or less worn-out idea face an audience which may not know the idea at all, and with which they will have to emphasize content to be understood at all--the more in as the artist struggling to be clear in their own mind about what they are saying, and beyond presenting the message, explain it, justify it, rather than repeat what is already accepted, so that subtleties are less likely to be plausible, even if they are practicable. Indeed, rather than a desensitized audience they have more occasion to worry about the intensity of the audience's reaction to the content itself, whether it might not bring on them persecution.

Turning from the artist to the art critics, who by and large are creatures of the established, it seems natural that for them the Art of Beauty sets the standard--such that they exalt form above content--with this also convenient in a rather cynical political way. If the Art of Beauty sets the standard, then it is Establishment Art which is worthy--whereas the Art of those challenging the Establishment can be dismissed as poor art, or not even art at all (as at least one critic who fought this battle in the literary arena in the twentieth century had it, journalism rather than literature), inducing those respectful of such critical opinion to ignore them or join in their denigration. Meanwhile, to the extent that those standards induce those for whom the Art of Power is the natural course to use the techniques of the Art of Beauty, that critical standard induces them to be a lot less effective in their propagandizing they might be, forgetting what they are trying to say as they worry about how to say it, and when they say anything at all saying it in such a way that no one cares what they were saying. Indeed, the artist in question may end up adapting their content to the forms they feel pressed to use--as E.L. Doctorow and Bill Moyers had it in their interview, painting in miniatures with very small strokes, rather than addressing "the big story" that is arguably the greatest and most consequential of the artist's concerns.

For those who desire that they not get the Message out there at all, this is the ultimate victory.