There is now a lavishly-funded prize for right-wing literary and visual art. Also I see in response
There is now a lavishly-funded prize for right-wing literary and visual art. Also I see in response to the spate of woke children’s books à la Anti-Racist Baby an emerging counter-trend, e.g., The Island of Free Ice Cream, where some kids attempt to visit the eponymous utopia and end up on the gulag archipelago instead. There’s no point denying that official organs of culture, from entertainment to academe to journalism, have over the last decade insisted to the point of suffocation on explicitly progressive art, and often with a newfangled concept of progress alien to the liberals and leftists of even the mid-2000s, yet I have little interest in overtly reactionary art. I prefer art without qualification. Not that an imagined recreation of the world doesn’t imply a politics, but if that is its only purpose or effect, then its spirit is too small. There should be some sense of journey and surprise, not orderly deductions from an axiomatic premise. Even explicitly political works, if they have imaginative grandeur, will survive to see their politics quarreled over by opposite factions when enough time goes by for the terms of debate to change beyond recognition. What are the politics of Hamlet? A reactionary warning against disorders in the kingdom? A revolutionary epiphany that order is founded on nothing? A lament for a lost masculinity or the triumphant birth of a new man? The Ghost is Catholic, the Prince Protestant, the climax a black mass. The hero is a visionary misogynist, his spurned lover an incipient feminist poet. Hamlet is neither right nor left but north-northwest. It is the world in 20 scenes. This is the art we should aspire to. -- source link
#aesthetics#literary criticism