The Artist as Aristocrat

Those of conventional, "middle class" (aka, bourgeois) mind may look at the steady 8-to-6 routine of the employee at a materially productive task they regard as the sole responsible and respectable path (the more in as the routine entails no intrinsic pleasure, and much displeasure), and see in a person's opting for the career of an artist instead something subversive of conservative values. However, the choice the artist makes is apt to be a choice of one conservatism over another--rejecting the life of the bourgeois in favor of the life of the aristocrat. Like the aristocrat (certainly as analyzed by Thorstein Veblen) the artist lives not by diligence at "industrial tasks," but by a personal prowess that makes them part of an elite presumed to be entitled to a claim on the resources of a society where the majority is obliged to live on that diligent-industrial basis, all as the artist's motives often include a more than usually strong aspiration to enjoy what the bourgeois conventionally has little opportunity to partake of but which loom large in the aristocrat's life--leisure, the graces of life, personal distinction. They also include their avoiding the unattractions of the "workaday life" to which they are, similarly, likely to be more than usually averse (the kind of penury unavoidable by persons who do not have really great wealth, control by a "boss" for most of their waking hours, etc.), with really full enjoyment of all this hinging on their being vaulted from obscurity to that sort of latterday aristocratic existence called "celebrity."

Of course, it is a notorious fact that very, very few of the aspirants to celebrity by way of art or anything else actually realize that aspiration--and fewer still do so who are not themselves born connected with the world of the arts do so, or at least from backgrounds of comparable privilege facilitating entrée into that world. (Perhaps their parents were not movie stars, but as the sons of publishing executives and daughters of broadcasters still part of the "media-industrial complex." Or maybe if they did not have media jobs their parents were lawyers or real estate agents--to the stars! Or dad was a billionaire or mom a Senator. And so forth.)

All this, too, can seem a very plausible basis for, as David Walsh put it, "Bohemianism, individualism and egotism" that a bourgeois may disapprove for its implications in such matters as their urbanity or even self-indulgence in deviations from traditional standards in sexual conduct or narcotics consumption, or their libertarian opposition to intrusions of state authority into personal pleasure-seeking or the censorship of their work by authority figures--but which for all that are a long way from being "left." One may add to this that in getting to that point in their careers and in the public's renown at which one can really speak of them as artists and celebrities in good standing, enjoying the perquisites of the position, many will have experienced a brutalizing upward climb, which lends their assertion of their status that edge that comes with having had to fight (perhaps, fight without the support of those nearest and dearest from whom they would have expected loyalty) to get what they regard as merely their due recognized--all as they remember all too well the way "the public" ignored or insulted them. Combined with their attachment to the considerable privileges they enjoy, one can easily picture this making them at least as self-absorbed, self-pitying, callous to the plight of the less fortunate and hostile to any demands that might be made on the fortunate (like a higher tax bill) as any other "self-made man"--with all that goes with that ideologically. This is reinforced, again, by the reality that in a situation where business ultimately prevails it is those artists who most readily produce what business wants who are more likely to work, to get ahead, to exercise any influence over what gets made--and these, of course, tend to more readily produce what is wanted because their personal thoughts and sentiments are in line with those of the businessmen, thoughts and sentiments to which they gravitate as they go from merely being courtiers of the elite to being of the elite themselves (as it seems safe to say happens when as can now happen a writer or film director or recording artist becomes a producer, and the producer becomes one of the world's few thousand billionaires, and thus part of the "0.0001 percent").

For all that, there are artists who do espouse socially critical, left-leaning views and manage to produce works in accordance with them in spite of the considerable obstacles in the way of such. However, what is at issue here is not the existence of individual artists of left-leaning views, but the prevailing norm, especially among those who actually get to make a living from finding an appreciable audience their artistic production, and its extreme distance from the simple-minded yet endlessly repeated stereotypes of artists as leftist--and its implications for artistic production, which leftist analysts have been logging since at least Upton Sinclair's time, not least the way that those attracted to an aristocratic way of life are likely to give the lower orders they must find the less attractive for having sought to escape them the short shrift the arts have always given them.