The Artist and Society: A Few More Reflections

Recently reviewing and more generally discussing Upton Sinclair's Mammonart and Money Writes! I have found myself particularly attentive to what Sinclair had to say about how artists work, and what it means for them and their work in societal life--not just the extent to which "money writes," but to which artists' "impressionability" leaves them following rather than leading, and serving power very willingly, the "ruling-class artist" the norm and the "hero artist" the rarity, especially when we consider those who ever had the chance to make an impact on the world.

I cannot say that these ideas were new to me--but I do not think I ever spent so much time considering them as I have since turning my attention to Sinclair's books the way I have this year, and certainly never felt the weight of those ideas so much as I do now. Perhaps it is because ever since I looked to literature for more than entertainment it has been the hero artists--whom, I might add, have tended to be more than conveyors of "impressions"--that I have found worthiest of my interest and my time, all as, frankly, I have been still more attentive to them since I stopped bothering with books just because they are canonical. (Perhaps, too, that I have spent so much time on science fiction, and especially its more cerebral writers, matters in this.)

Now having done so I find it awfully depressing given the conventional view of the artist as a sort of latterday seer, and of the artist as, in Graham Greene's "The Virtue of Disloyalty," a champion of the downtrodden. Yet there is no denying that this explains much we see in the past, and the present--however unhappily--with illusions about what artists can do for us better set aside than sustained, demanding of art everything that it can give us but not expecting from it what it cannot.