Art is Not a Bible Lesson
We do not have to forgive our pop stars.
Recently, the critic Christian Lorentzen reposted a New Yorker review of Malaparte by Thomas Meaney calling it “a must read on the fascist imaginary.” He immediately faced pushback. “You know it's a sign of the times when The New Yorker @newyorker decides to profile a fascist,” a faceless account responded. “It's a book review of a biography of a long dead writer, not a profile. Sorry to expose you to cooties, bro,” Lorentzen replied. Of course, this doesn’t mean readers need to gloss everything with the same neutral eye. The desire to moralize, and thus legislate, the art that the public consumes has long dogged both sides of the political aisle. The feminist Sex Wars of the 1970s attempted to ban pornography for its alleged inherent misogyny and in the 1980s Tipper Gore helped to create the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) which tried to mandate parental advisory labels on music with explicit content. Rarely has there been a consensus on how to square politics and art.
Art is not a Bible lesson. All too often there is a tendency to treat “storytelling as politics.” Pop stars are not political theorists or role models. Characters—and let’s face it pop stars are often treated like characters—-are not paragons of perfection. "Is [pop star] a feminist? Is Mastercard a queer ally? Is this TV show my friend?" a Twitter user posted back in 2015. Part of a pop star’s job is to provoke, to continually transform, performing trick after trick for a bewitched and enraptured audience. But art is not bad because it doesn’t mimic our political praxis. Consuming art is not the same as enacting politics. Besides, well-behaved artists rarely make their mark. Transgressors from John Waters to Amiri Baraka have checkered pasts, even Nabokov faced accusations of being a pedophile for publishing Lolita. More recently–though perhaps only marginally less provocative, Lena Dunham has experienced a career resurgence through her now T.V. show Too Much and the Girls Rewatch Podcast.
Readers are struggling to differentiate the art from the artist. Some art is about bad people, some art is made by bad people. There are still reasonable ways to approach art that evokes difficult feelings. In a world swarming with reactionaries, right-wing aesthetes, and fascists, the best way to approach making art has become a heated debate. A wave of reactionary thought has sprung up even in ostensibly liberal circles, often invoked in online circles focused on maintaining political purity. Readers and listeners are afraid of exposing themselves to work they deem to be morally “bad.” Not abhorrent or evil but “bad,” a nebulous way of expressing a fear of contamination by mere exposure to a work of art that makes someone uncomfortable. The struggle is to find space between the anti-woke fascists and those who become so self-reflexive they use their sensitivity as a weapon. There’s clearly a stark difference between the two—but where does one draw the line?
Perhaps, as the Right tries to outlaw protests and political speech, our political aspirations for purity have been displaced into the cultural sphere. Our feelings of political helplessness manifest as infighting about reading old fascists like Malaparte. Often these debates occur on X, “the everything app.” This kind of symptomatic fear of contamination is all too common. People would prefer to completely disavow and push such literature away. In a 2020 Bookforum essay, Lauren Oyler wrote about a cultural obsession with characters being good. “Is it okay to like a book written by a bad person?” Oyler asks. This kind of reading is prescriptive, in search of a manual for living the good life. Too often readers end up afraid of characters whose desires and choices are different from their own. Unfortunately for such readers, characters are not saviors.
Of course, this kind of reading isn’t limited to one form of media. Often, creators, their work, and their public personas are conflated. Sometimes artists can go beyond the pale, teetering into “cancellable” space. It’s nearly a trope—the pop star writing a Notes App apology. Abolitionist thinker Adrienne Maree Brown dug into this tension back in 2018 when Kanye West first started courting Trump’s favor: “When people say they are done with Kanye that’s fair. But he’s not dead, he’s not gone, he might be learning something important, even if I don’t have much emotional room for it.” This is the crux. Fans can have boundaries with pop stars. Still, “there’s no such thing as a community in which all harm has been exiled,” Brown said. There is no art without risk. We don’t need to forgive, excuse, or even listen to our pop stars.
As authors and characters are conflated, reviews of novels have become increasingly biographical. The author is back from the grave. Fiction can now be read as nonfiction. “When we cannot even understand that a short story is fiction, and that a writer has carefully chosen how to construct her world, with its own architecture and a universe separate from our own, we flatten it completely, and we also flatten our own ability to think critically,” Larissa Pham wrote back in 2017. Marginalized authors, especially trans women and Black writers, often bear the brunt of this conflation. It’s ironic that the very people the cultural left seeks to enshrine are often the targets of the most virulent critiques. The trans sci-fi writer Isabel Fall received a vicious thrashing online for not revealing her identity as a trans woman after publishing her short story "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter." High-profile sci-fi authors condemned the story as transphobic without realizing the story was written by a trans woman. She’s all but vanished from the online sphere since. Critic and essayist Kate Wagner recently argued in Lux Magazine that “we have become our own panopticons.”
Goodreads is often a breeding ground for these puritanical readings of literature. Ruth Madievsky introduced her own rule: “The Madievsky Rule is this: 3.5 stars on Goodreads is the sweet spot for contemporary literary fiction written by women about women.” She asks us to confront this trend: “What do these books have in common, aside from being written by women about women? Many include frank, immersive depictions of women’s sexual desire and women fucking. The sex does not fade to black, and reviews describe it as obscene, dark, disturbing.” Black authors often face even more scrutiny. One reviewer expresses their discomfort with Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater by calling the author out for centering men, zeroing in on one character’s arc in particular: “CHIMA ISN'T EVEN REVEALED TO BE AN ABUSER UNTIL LIKE 88% INTO THE NOVEL??!?!?” In the puritan’s view, characters are only ever supposed to be clear heroes or villains.
Black writers are often expected to instead perform a certain self-conscious narrative. “Part of the work of the Black literary tradition has been to challenge these images; it has always carried the unique burden of representation: who gets it, who decides who gets it and what “it” even is,” Ismael Muhammed wrote in The New York Times. “Writers play into representation’s trap even as they express an anxiety about its limits and what it demands.” The desire to uplift instead of transform is, itself, conservative. Pushing at boundaries is always taboo. Work that tries to reckon with harm will always face scrutiny. It should. But that doesn’t mean it should be called on to perform morality as a net good in and of itself.
All of this betrays a very binary reading of art. Representation is good or bad, artists are in or out. Rarely do such moral readers approach culture dialectically. Perhaps creators can be fallible and worthy of love—or at least examination. Sometimes an author is worth reading precisely because they are despicable. Their work can be provocative, forcing us to further understand our own inner compass, desires, and faults—even if their work must come with a heavy dose of asterisks.
Last December, Dean Kissick argued in a now-infamous Harper’s cover story that the contemporary art scene had been destroyed by resistance-oriented politics. Woke, in essence, had destroyed our ability to approach art without using words like “urgent” and “important.” Kissick’s argument that art had become too entrenched with morality is a curious one, considering that art has always toed the line between instruction, expression, and catharsis. In some ways I agree with Kissick that politics can be a political smoke screen for bad (as in facile or weak) art. But Kissick’s argument that liberal politics has killed artistic expression is certainly reactionary. However, so is the prevailing counter-argument on the left that heavily relies on the dichotomy of good and bad representation. Moral puritanism can all too easily replicate the same knee-jerk reaction to art that is not easily digestible. Sometimes art can provoke both the comfortable and the disturbed.
Criticism, at its best, does not inoculate its subjects. It holds them to the fire even when it expresses admiration. Meaney’s review of Maurizio Serra’s biography Malaparte walks just this tightrope:
“Serra never tries to exculpate Malaparte, but there are points where he presents him as having a mind too fine for ideologies, who did not need Fascism as much as it needed him. Malaparte himself, however, does not make this kind of defense easy.”
There is no need to defend all the art one consumes. This doesn’t mean readers need to ingest the work uncritically; art never supersedes its social context, nor should it. In the words of many professional social media bios: “Reposts are not endorsements.”
Image: “The Line,” (1978) Philip Guston.
This is a good reason to read/produced in other times and cultures. Murasaki Shikibu's politics are incommensurate with ours. That doesn't mean The Tale of Genji doesn't work for contemporary readers. And it's precisely how it can work that's worth thinking about.