Rurik from Hanoi writes: What should an artist be doing right now? More specifically, what should the kind of artist who finds himself amiable to your writing be doing now? Even more specifically, in a world where comporting your message with Power is a component of success, what should an artist do who see disagrees with the prevailing vision of Power but who still wants to push his Art out into the world?
Yep right on, don't try to make "right wing art" --- all politics (even good politics) occurs at a level of resolution that has already cropped out the nuance required to produce good art. You need that raw, unprocessed ether, you need that shadowy chaos, you need to dive deep beneath the waves to get to that shiny good stuff, then you need to drag it back up to the surface via artistic interpretation and express it in ways normies can understand.
I'd even caution against expressing yourself --- try to get at truths, which will end up expressing your experience of those truths, but "self expression" is another trap of modern art (much less detrimental than politics, but a trap nonetheless). You want to express God (or for you atheists, "The Universe"), Truth, grace, beauty, something that's real and bigger than just you, though of course it is your unique vision that comes through in the art. It's just that latter bit is less important. Try not to take credit for the majesty of existence.
Just seeking Truth as an artist will make your work political (though it's not created from politics or as politics, it will take on political meaning in the world). Don't force it. If you make something True it will stand in such stark, damning contrast to propaganda that it will end up far more effective than mere counter-propaganda. This pomo obsession that art is purely subjective is an excuse for the weak and floundering --- there is comfort for the lost in fragmentation, like a shattered mirror. Art is difficult and infinitely complex, but True art is as True to you as it is to me.
Just creating will pit you against the destroyers. The devil can't create, and he hates you because you can. Ignore the noise by focusing in on your craft. Dismiss distractions. Look to pre-modern art, participative art, liturgical art, art with a purpose other than simply taking up space.
And good luck brother, now is a great time for real artists --- right now it may be only us who see the beast in its death throes, but it will be obvious to more and more people as time goes on, and when those people look around in confusion, we'll be ready to point them towards what's real. Until then do what artists do.
Art is a calling. The metaphor of the Muse describes a real phenomenon. She sings through you. It is not you, meaning the you that eats and shits and goes to your day job, but the you that is bigger than that and deeper than that, the you that you spend most of your time pretending is not there because it crushes you to admit it, because it shows that they guy in the mirror, shaving, has, all too often, disgraced what he could be and should be. Trying to transcend that disgrace is hard but, it seems, worth trying. Probably so, based on observation and speculation more than personal experience. If you are called by the muse, it is blasphemous, wrong, a sin, not to respond. If you have anything to say, you have to say it truthfully, meaning artistic truth, in whatever medium, not literal truth, which is of course not art, which is never literal, even if it feigns literalness. And it is not political, which is among the most debased of human activities, the manipulation of power for advantage. If you answer the call, if you submit to the call, then you are likely to suffer because it is hard to do. You will be pestered by the urge to compose or write at the wrong times, when it is inconvenient and disruptive. You will try to balance it, but it is not a phenomenon which is susceptible to balance. This is because the Muse is a goddess, not a hireling or a prostitute. You work for her, not the other way around. She is willful and bossy and unreasonable. And if you take her gifts, you submit to her authority. You become hers by right, and you have a duty to let her sing through you. And what comes forth from you then is bigger than you, and it is not just yours anymore. And if it is good, or it's shit, others will say. But that has nothing to do with your duty to make it. And you should make it as good as you can, but that is technique. It is very important, technique, but do not mistake it for the essence, which is the Goddess's song singing through you to the world. If you don't hear that, and answer it, and send it forth, then whatever you are doing is some kind of business or psychological acting out, or posturing for approval of others, or jockeying for some kind of recognition, but it is unlikely to be good, or maybe it will be merely good. Some ways to invoke the muse: Immersion in excellent examples of the medium you are drawn to, seriousness about craft skills that make it possible to actually execute, and a willingness to pay a hard price to tell the truth through the work you do, or at least to embark on the journey so that you have foreclosed the option of not paying the price. One way to persevere is to find a small number of honest, tough-minded friends who share our love for the art you aspire to, to commiserate and to receive corrections. But even alone, perseverance is possibly the most important virtue, especially picking up where you left off, no matter what life has thrown at you. That people who hear the muse respond to her is more important than any of the political things happening now. It is the foundation on which all else is built. But it is still pertinent to politics, but indirectly. The path to clarity and change and transformation which will make it possible to transcend the shit show we are currently trapped in is through truth telling, and art is truth telling. This last is a paradox, but is certainly the case nonetheless.
Lots of great stuff is propaganda, if "propaganda" = "pushing a vision of how the world should be and/or how it is but shouldn't be." For example, the Aeneid, Song of Roland, and Lord of the Rings. There's deep and/or funny propaganda and shallow and/or boring propaganda, that's all.
In fact, every last bit of serious visual/plastic art was propaganda until the 16th Century. Almost all of the Bible is propaganda.
Non-propagandistic art is necessarily Progressive art because it's all about how things seem/feel to individual people who have to be eccentric or it'll be boring.
"Your themes will emerge naturally from who you are. You don’t need to force them and you don’t want to force them." -- This is bad advice for young people, who aren't really anything much and therefore don't have much of a "you" from which things can "emerge naturally." Note that this is the same advice that every urban "creative writing teacher" gives to her illiterate 16-year-old students; this is pretty solid evidence that it's bad advice.
Good advice might be "apprentice yourself to an expert technician and then find sign up for your favorite religion's propaganda-drive."
I don't understand modern art. I'm aware of the academic explanation for deconstruction but I think we all get it by now. Unfortunately I think deconstruction is tied up with irony, and it looks like irony infects everything in our society. How can good art be made popular in a culture like ours? Good art is sincere.
One simple heuristic that might be useful here is, relinquishing the hope of being relevant or appreciated in your own lifetime will help direct you away from the path of propaganda. Whether or not you can create true art is another story, but at least this way you won't be an accidental propagandist.
If the art in question is some piece of fictional writing then I don’t see how depicting a cool, modern monarchical state is cringe. A lot of sci fi has predicted the future. Some story could correctly predict aspects of our Prince and his regime.
I’ll chip in my two cents as an aspiring writer who has devoted a lot of thought to this question.
Personally, I like to write stories that draw a lot from history (so much so that I went into history and then dropped out of uni, much like the math nerd from the last letter). I also like to see stories as ways of exploring ideas. If they exorcise any negative emotions or feelings, they do so completely subconsciously. I've tried and failed to write those kinds of stories in a conscious manner.
I think that the closest I've ever come to having a political message was doing a close examination of how ancient people would react to modern civilization (it's equally enormous volumes of disgust and amazement). This was written before I discovered Yarvin, and I'm surprised at how similar they sound. It was honestly very satisfying to see that I had constructed a way of looking at the world that someone could genuinely hold. Writing real people is always one of my primary goals.
The second closest to a "political" work might be a sort of blidungsroman set in a difficult to summarize fantasy setting. I'll try anyway. Western Indo-European style gods/spirits are real and involved in the world, most are alright. Magic is rare. Technology is broadly renaissance, with very few places having up to 1930's level tech - at least one goddess has a radio program. Earth is young so hydrocarbons are non-existent, meaning that industrialization is way harder and nature spirits get in the way. The plot revolves around a young person that had their life derailed - forced to take on the family business of a merchant caravan in order to stop their family from starving, and is ultimately an exploration of human relationships, economics, and duty in a much more socially complex world. What do you owe your god, your family, your neighbor, your village, your local spirits, your country, and strangers? How do you balance obligation with personal desires and life plans?
Those are real questions that people had to answer for many years before our time. They're very interesting questions. And I want to look at them sincerely, exploring what I find intriguing about them as well as what I find off putting. For instance - I don’t like arranged marriage! I like it when love and mutual affection dictate marriage. But the economic realities of the past made love secondary to the survival of family business, industry, and finance. Are there ways to square those two? If they’re even tried, how do people cope when those attempts at squaring romance and economic necessity fail?
The key takeaway is that at no point do I see myself as telling people what to think. I see myself as crafting a narrative which explores ideas and characters that interest me. It's the difference between inviting someone to a sermon, and inviting someone to dinner. The former people what to think. The latter invites them to savor the ideas you've cooked up *with you.* Passive vs active. Stories for children have answers. Stories for adults have questions. Make no mistake, there can be good children’s stories. I still enjoy plenty of them. But I would contend that they are harder to write, because they must keep a fundamentally passive observer engaged. If you ask good questions, the viewer/reader manufactures most of their own engagement. This requires you to think about what a good question is, but if you spend any time thinking at all, you’ll find some. There are plenty.
The only thing that I think could be construed as preachy, and is perhaps a result of my own dissatisfaction with social realities, is how obviously more fulfilled people are despite lower levels of comfort and higher levels of obligation. But frankly, that's just a historical reality. Even so, the contrast between our society and societies past is so great that just portraying functioning (if imperfect) social institutions almost feels like the story is shouting at you, but from a distance. It’s never compared and contrasted with our social reality directly, but the contrast is so stark that the comparison gets made on its own. “We’d be happier if the world was like this!” Which again, is true - of course people would feel less alone if they were involved in their community! I’m still not entirely sure how to solve this problem, if it’s a problem that’s worth solving, or if it’s even a problem at all.
In any case, I would discourage you from focusing on anything resembling contemporary political struggles. If your objective is to craft something truly beautiful that will be worth reading far into the future, ignore ephemeral political struggles. Focus on the much more universal human struggles. Your competition in that arena isn't the libs, whose propaganda will be forgotten. It's giants like Homer. Obviously your art is a product of your thought, which will be influenced by and ultimately exist as a response to your times, so you can’t cut out present day politics entirely. Paradise Lost could be thought of as an allegory for the Glorious Revolution, and the Aeneid was literally state propaganda. But they both deal with serious questions and don’t always provide clear answers. At the most, contemporary political issues or struggles can only ever exist as context in the story. The moment that contemporary political issues become the primary focus of the story - as opposed to focusing on the creation of something beautiful, or the exploration of the human condition, or even the exploration of the human condition *within the cultural context of the present* - then the relevance of the story becomes just as ephemeral as the relevance of the subject matter.
Mystery, too, is a key component. It’s tantalizing. A good work that fills in all or most of the details can be a true gem, but only a special sort of person will want to read it more than once. The sort of person who appreciates the superb construction of it. But for the writer, the path to eternity is through mystery. It keeps people talking about your work, thinking about your work, creating stories to answer questions left unresolved by your work. Straightforward political propaganda is completely unambiguous, and so it is cringe and forgotten swiftly.
TL;DR Create the art that you’re passionate about. Don’t worry about making it about a specific message. Curtis is right, people will get a sense for you. And when you look at the examples from my own writing, or the examples from the greats I mentioned, these are all best understood within their context. Paradise Lost was made to create something beautiful, but concealed in it is Milton’s wistful and hopeful longing for popular government. It bleeds through. My fascination with the past has led me to many of my current social and political thoughts. They arise naturally and organically in the work, and are not nearly as off putting for that reason. They invite people to think with them. They don’t try to think *for* people.
Yep right on, don't try to make "right wing art" --- all politics (even good politics) occurs at a level of resolution that has already cropped out the nuance required to produce good art. You need that raw, unprocessed ether, you need that shadowy chaos, you need to dive deep beneath the waves to get to that shiny good stuff, then you need to drag it back up to the surface via artistic interpretation and express it in ways normies can understand.
I'd even caution against expressing yourself --- try to get at truths, which will end up expressing your experience of those truths, but "self expression" is another trap of modern art (much less detrimental than politics, but a trap nonetheless). You want to express God (or for you atheists, "The Universe"), Truth, grace, beauty, something that's real and bigger than just you, though of course it is your unique vision that comes through in the art. It's just that latter bit is less important. Try not to take credit for the majesty of existence.
Just seeking Truth as an artist will make your work political (though it's not created from politics or as politics, it will take on political meaning in the world). Don't force it. If you make something True it will stand in such stark, damning contrast to propaganda that it will end up far more effective than mere counter-propaganda. This pomo obsession that art is purely subjective is an excuse for the weak and floundering --- there is comfort for the lost in fragmentation, like a shattered mirror. Art is difficult and infinitely complex, but True art is as True to you as it is to me.
Just creating will pit you against the destroyers. The devil can't create, and he hates you because you can. Ignore the noise by focusing in on your craft. Dismiss distractions. Look to pre-modern art, participative art, liturgical art, art with a purpose other than simply taking up space.
And good luck brother, now is a great time for real artists --- right now it may be only us who see the beast in its death throes, but it will be obvious to more and more people as time goes on, and when those people look around in confusion, we'll be ready to point them towards what's real. Until then do what artists do.
Art is a calling. The metaphor of the Muse describes a real phenomenon. She sings through you. It is not you, meaning the you that eats and shits and goes to your day job, but the you that is bigger than that and deeper than that, the you that you spend most of your time pretending is not there because it crushes you to admit it, because it shows that they guy in the mirror, shaving, has, all too often, disgraced what he could be and should be. Trying to transcend that disgrace is hard but, it seems, worth trying. Probably so, based on observation and speculation more than personal experience. If you are called by the muse, it is blasphemous, wrong, a sin, not to respond. If you have anything to say, you have to say it truthfully, meaning artistic truth, in whatever medium, not literal truth, which is of course not art, which is never literal, even if it feigns literalness. And it is not political, which is among the most debased of human activities, the manipulation of power for advantage. If you answer the call, if you submit to the call, then you are likely to suffer because it is hard to do. You will be pestered by the urge to compose or write at the wrong times, when it is inconvenient and disruptive. You will try to balance it, but it is not a phenomenon which is susceptible to balance. This is because the Muse is a goddess, not a hireling or a prostitute. You work for her, not the other way around. She is willful and bossy and unreasonable. And if you take her gifts, you submit to her authority. You become hers by right, and you have a duty to let her sing through you. And what comes forth from you then is bigger than you, and it is not just yours anymore. And if it is good, or it's shit, others will say. But that has nothing to do with your duty to make it. And you should make it as good as you can, but that is technique. It is very important, technique, but do not mistake it for the essence, which is the Goddess's song singing through you to the world. If you don't hear that, and answer it, and send it forth, then whatever you are doing is some kind of business or psychological acting out, or posturing for approval of others, or jockeying for some kind of recognition, but it is unlikely to be good, or maybe it will be merely good. Some ways to invoke the muse: Immersion in excellent examples of the medium you are drawn to, seriousness about craft skills that make it possible to actually execute, and a willingness to pay a hard price to tell the truth through the work you do, or at least to embark on the journey so that you have foreclosed the option of not paying the price. One way to persevere is to find a small number of honest, tough-minded friends who share our love for the art you aspire to, to commiserate and to receive corrections. But even alone, perseverance is possibly the most important virtue, especially picking up where you left off, no matter what life has thrown at you. That people who hear the muse respond to her is more important than any of the political things happening now. It is the foundation on which all else is built. But it is still pertinent to politics, but indirectly. The path to clarity and change and transformation which will make it possible to transcend the shit show we are currently trapped in is through truth telling, and art is truth telling. This last is a paradox, but is certainly the case nonetheless.
Basically the sentiment of every true self-supporting artist I know. And that's more than five, mind you.
Lots of great stuff is propaganda, if "propaganda" = "pushing a vision of how the world should be and/or how it is but shouldn't be." For example, the Aeneid, Song of Roland, and Lord of the Rings. There's deep and/or funny propaganda and shallow and/or boring propaganda, that's all.
In fact, every last bit of serious visual/plastic art was propaganda until the 16th Century. Almost all of the Bible is propaganda.
Non-propagandistic art is necessarily Progressive art because it's all about how things seem/feel to individual people who have to be eccentric or it'll be boring.
"Your themes will emerge naturally from who you are. You don’t need to force them and you don’t want to force them." -- This is bad advice for young people, who aren't really anything much and therefore don't have much of a "you" from which things can "emerge naturally." Note that this is the same advice that every urban "creative writing teacher" gives to her illiterate 16-year-old students; this is pretty solid evidence that it's bad advice.
Good advice might be "apprentice yourself to an expert technician and then find sign up for your favorite religion's propaganda-drive."
I don't understand modern art. I'm aware of the academic explanation for deconstruction but I think we all get it by now. Unfortunately I think deconstruction is tied up with irony, and it looks like irony infects everything in our society. How can good art be made popular in a culture like ours? Good art is sincere.
One simple heuristic that might be useful here is, relinquishing the hope of being relevant or appreciated in your own lifetime will help direct you away from the path of propaganda. Whether or not you can create true art is another story, but at least this way you won't be an accidental propagandist.
If the art in question is some piece of fictional writing then I don’t see how depicting a cool, modern monarchical state is cringe. A lot of sci fi has predicted the future. Some story could correctly predict aspects of our Prince and his regime.
Dear Curtis,
Is meme not art? Is it not true that the left can't meme?
I rest my case
I’ll chip in my two cents as an aspiring writer who has devoted a lot of thought to this question.
Personally, I like to write stories that draw a lot from history (so much so that I went into history and then dropped out of uni, much like the math nerd from the last letter). I also like to see stories as ways of exploring ideas. If they exorcise any negative emotions or feelings, they do so completely subconsciously. I've tried and failed to write those kinds of stories in a conscious manner.
I think that the closest I've ever come to having a political message was doing a close examination of how ancient people would react to modern civilization (it's equally enormous volumes of disgust and amazement). This was written before I discovered Yarvin, and I'm surprised at how similar they sound. It was honestly very satisfying to see that I had constructed a way of looking at the world that someone could genuinely hold. Writing real people is always one of my primary goals.
The second closest to a "political" work might be a sort of blidungsroman set in a difficult to summarize fantasy setting. I'll try anyway. Western Indo-European style gods/spirits are real and involved in the world, most are alright. Magic is rare. Technology is broadly renaissance, with very few places having up to 1930's level tech - at least one goddess has a radio program. Earth is young so hydrocarbons are non-existent, meaning that industrialization is way harder and nature spirits get in the way. The plot revolves around a young person that had their life derailed - forced to take on the family business of a merchant caravan in order to stop their family from starving, and is ultimately an exploration of human relationships, economics, and duty in a much more socially complex world. What do you owe your god, your family, your neighbor, your village, your local spirits, your country, and strangers? How do you balance obligation with personal desires and life plans?
Those are real questions that people had to answer for many years before our time. They're very interesting questions. And I want to look at them sincerely, exploring what I find intriguing about them as well as what I find off putting. For instance - I don’t like arranged marriage! I like it when love and mutual affection dictate marriage. But the economic realities of the past made love secondary to the survival of family business, industry, and finance. Are there ways to square those two? If they’re even tried, how do people cope when those attempts at squaring romance and economic necessity fail?
The key takeaway is that at no point do I see myself as telling people what to think. I see myself as crafting a narrative which explores ideas and characters that interest me. It's the difference between inviting someone to a sermon, and inviting someone to dinner. The former people what to think. The latter invites them to savor the ideas you've cooked up *with you.* Passive vs active. Stories for children have answers. Stories for adults have questions. Make no mistake, there can be good children’s stories. I still enjoy plenty of them. But I would contend that they are harder to write, because they must keep a fundamentally passive observer engaged. If you ask good questions, the viewer/reader manufactures most of their own engagement. This requires you to think about what a good question is, but if you spend any time thinking at all, you’ll find some. There are plenty.
The only thing that I think could be construed as preachy, and is perhaps a result of my own dissatisfaction with social realities, is how obviously more fulfilled people are despite lower levels of comfort and higher levels of obligation. But frankly, that's just a historical reality. Even so, the contrast between our society and societies past is so great that just portraying functioning (if imperfect) social institutions almost feels like the story is shouting at you, but from a distance. It’s never compared and contrasted with our social reality directly, but the contrast is so stark that the comparison gets made on its own. “We’d be happier if the world was like this!” Which again, is true - of course people would feel less alone if they were involved in their community! I’m still not entirely sure how to solve this problem, if it’s a problem that’s worth solving, or if it’s even a problem at all.
In any case, I would discourage you from focusing on anything resembling contemporary political struggles. If your objective is to craft something truly beautiful that will be worth reading far into the future, ignore ephemeral political struggles. Focus on the much more universal human struggles. Your competition in that arena isn't the libs, whose propaganda will be forgotten. It's giants like Homer. Obviously your art is a product of your thought, which will be influenced by and ultimately exist as a response to your times, so you can’t cut out present day politics entirely. Paradise Lost could be thought of as an allegory for the Glorious Revolution, and the Aeneid was literally state propaganda. But they both deal with serious questions and don’t always provide clear answers. At the most, contemporary political issues or struggles can only ever exist as context in the story. The moment that contemporary political issues become the primary focus of the story - as opposed to focusing on the creation of something beautiful, or the exploration of the human condition, or even the exploration of the human condition *within the cultural context of the present* - then the relevance of the story becomes just as ephemeral as the relevance of the subject matter.
Mystery, too, is a key component. It’s tantalizing. A good work that fills in all or most of the details can be a true gem, but only a special sort of person will want to read it more than once. The sort of person who appreciates the superb construction of it. But for the writer, the path to eternity is through mystery. It keeps people talking about your work, thinking about your work, creating stories to answer questions left unresolved by your work. Straightforward political propaganda is completely unambiguous, and so it is cringe and forgotten swiftly.
TL;DR Create the art that you’re passionate about. Don’t worry about making it about a specific message. Curtis is right, people will get a sense for you. And when you look at the examples from my own writing, or the examples from the greats I mentioned, these are all best understood within their context. Paradise Lost was made to create something beautiful, but concealed in it is Milton’s wistful and hopeful longing for popular government. It bleeds through. My fascination with the past has led me to many of my current social and political thoughts. They arise naturally and organically in the work, and are not nearly as off putting for that reason. They invite people to think with them. They don’t try to think *for* people.
I hope that was helpful.
But again how should those of us invested in the arts make a living, when the institutions are totally corrupted?