Artistic Integrity (Caturday)

Big Cat, Little Cat: Artistic Integrity

What is Artistic Integrity and How Much does it Cost?

What happens to an artist who is commercially successful? Or a politician for that matter? People talk about how “so-and-so went to Washington and forgot who voted them in.” Or “So and so got big and now just makes corporate art.” What’s corporate art? Is it bad? Is it good?

Abstract art was meant to be a rebellion against what the public wanted. The increasingly abstract, expressionistic, and symbolic art of the early 20th century was meant as a protest against the establishment. So why is it that that’s the type of art you’re most likely to see on the walls of lawyers and dentists?

The Moon is Down

One of the most interesting novels of the 20th century is a book called The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck. He wrote it in 1942, and it is a narrative about a town in an unnamed country (probably Norway) giving resistance to the occupiers from another unnamed country (definitely Germany). One of the central plot points of the novel is that the women agree to a Lysistrata-style sex pact, whereby they refuse to sleep with the occupying soldiers. Occasionally one of them seems to relent only to lead the soldier into an ambush, whereupon partisans hide the body in the snow.

The centrality and valor of sex workers in this novel provides an interesting contrast to some of Steinbecks other books, like East of Eden, but never mind that. The point is that this book was Steinbecks introduction to the Office of Strategic Services, the organization that later became the CIA.

Artistic Integrity and The Moon is Down

So was The Moon is Down a work of artistic integrity or compromise?

Remember, this is the same Steinbeck who wrote Grapes of Wrath only three years earlier, a work that’s still occasionally banned in schools for being stridently critical of American crony capitalism. Three years. In three years, Steinbeck went from setting his pen against the entire system of class-based-oppression in the United States to working directly for the CIA. But then, a lot of people thought (rightly so) that Hitler was worth opposing at any cost. And remember also that people like Steinbeck who opposed aspects of the American socio-economic reality might still support the American project, especially against so stark a foe as Fascist Germany.

It’s easy to think now that the CIA (then the OSS) would continue to topple governments. But it’s also easy to argue that Steinbeck made the right choice. Most people could agree on toppling Germany in 1942. My own grandmother escaped from there in 1939; had she not, I would not be here.

Art Doesn’t Rebel; People Do

The point is that The Moon is Down did something very similar to what The Grapes of Wrath did. It helped bring to light the stories of people who did not have a loud enough voice of their own. It provided a blueprint for the conquered peoples of Europe to resist. Writers continue to do so.

Writers like Steinbeck and Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy gained popularity in their respective days for being privileged white male champions of the dispossessed: migrant workers, child laborers, and women, respectively. More and more, writers like Yaa Gyasi and Sunil Abhiman Awachar and Kyle Lukoff are showing that the dispossessed can argue quite well for themselves, as long as they are able to find a platform.

Absent direct political action, a thousand novels and poems are not enough to stop people with power from dispossessing, and further dispossessing the dispossessed. But these works of literature and everything around them–articles, interviews, adaptations, bring like-minded people together and give them a vision to strive for. And remind us that we’re not alone. I hope they do the world, and themselves, some good. I hope that people listen. Books and minds. They both have to be open if you want to turn to a new page.

Description

Three identical photo-images sit side by side. Each depicts a large orange cat with darker orange stripes on the left, looking down at a small grey cat with darker grey stripes on the right. The large orange has a placid expression on his face, the way lifelong friends sometimes wear during comfortable silences. The little grey, however, is looking irritably off into the distance, as if trying to remember a task uncompleted.

Panel 1

Little Cat: I can’t believe what sellouts people are these days.

Panel 2

Big Cat: I guess. What brought this to mind?
Little Cat: I’m just tired of all the phonies and fakes.

Panel 3

Little Cat: Plus, I’m hoping this “integrity” angle will attract corporate sponsorship.