Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34565
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34565
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Well, first, you cannot write about any politically charged issue without being read as taking sides. If you are ideologically aligned with one side, the other will throw rocks through your window. If you are not ideologically aligned with either side, both sides will throw rocks through your window.

Second, the job of the artist is to portray the world as they see it, as honestly and objectively as they can. This is a controversial position. There are many who feel that politics is the most fundamental human activity and that all art should therefore serve a political end and argue for a political cause.

But there is a very obvious flaw in this position. All politics bends towards an interest. It is about people getting what they want. However laudable or sympathetic their aims may feel to us, the greatest political advantage will come from exaggeration, passion, and, in some cases at least, outright lies. This is a universal. It is not about the rightness or wrongness of any one cause. It is just the way human beings get swayed to support one cause or another.

But truth matters. The distortions involved in supporting any cause, however sympathetic, do harm, and, in many cases, eventually undermine the cause they were designed to support. There is a role for art then, in stepping back from the political fray, and trying to tell the truth, to examine and report on what the human experience actually is. In other words, it is art can play a vital role by being purely descriptive and diagnostic, without being prescriptive or engaging in advocacy. (Sometimes it is the most honest and revealing descriptive work that turns out to change things were no amount of advocacy could.)

But doing this in the midst of any heated political topic means that both sides will identify you as an enemy and both will throw rocks through your windows. Such is simply the passion with which people defend and promote their causes.

There are two ways for an artist to deal with this:

1. Be brave. Accept that you are going to get rocks thrown through your windows and move your valuables to the center of the house. 

2. Be oblique. Find a way to talk about the experience that interests you in a way that avoids direct engagement with the political passions of your time. People in a state of political passion tend to be very literal and you can often examine the experiences behind the issue without their noticing simply by dressing the experience in different clothing. Thus, for example, authors have used encounters with aliens to examine all kinds of issues of encounter with otherness without the specific overtones of current racial or cultural disputes. This technique has been used to create art under the noses of tyrants and despots and the mob through all the centuries of art. 

On the other hand, if you are in fact trying to use art as a tool of advocacy, you just have to expect and accept the flac that comes with the territory when you do that. You can build a very lucrative career in advocacy art because it has a built in audience. You don't have to be as good an artist if you can get people to read you because you are supporting their cause. But brickbats will inevitably fly from those on the other side of the issue. There is no way around that.

Original score: 6