All Creation Involves Destruction. March 17, 2005
Posted by admin in : Discourse, Political/Editorial , trackbackBarney:
All creation involves destruction.
Ted:
Yeah, man, for real!
Barney:
Art is therefore violent by definition. Art means making, and making means creating, which requires destruction, which is also the same as violence.
Ted:
Oh my god I never thought of that! Wow!
Barney:
Artists take risks, the best ones do anyways. And sometimes these risks fail. But what is at stake? The artist’s work, the painting or opera or whatever. The artist’s reputation. Lives rarely hang in the balance.
Ted:
Yeah, Um. Ok.
Barney:
Politicians also take risks. Whole governments are created by the political acts of men, and these are often the products of visionaries. They are like artists, and to create they must destroy. Revolutionaries are by definition violent, so they are like artists. They are in fact artists.
Ted.
Maybe.
Barney:
But so much more is at stake. Lives hang in the balance.
Ted:
Uh-oh.
Barney:
You don’t want these guys fooling around. You want them to be sure about what they are doing. You want facts and figures to back up their policies. You want politics to be pragmatic, scientific. You don’t want to think of it as iffy and tentative as art.
Ted:
I know I do. Don’t.
Barney:
But the reality is that politics is as much an art as a science, and no painting was ever made based on facts and figures. We have to take risks, and be prepared for failure. But failure is expensive. To have political conviction requires courage, and ego. It requires sacrifice. It requires being willing to find out you are a monster, a fascist.
Ted:
I guess that’s true.
Barney:
Artists, conversely, may be construed as revolutionaries, some more successful than others, and some more violent than others. But they are actively trying to change our world. And the world that results may be a better world or a worse one. Though lives may not hang in the balance, the difference is really a matter of what’s at stake.
Ted:
Hitler was an artist, they say. A failed one.
Barney:
Thanks, Ted, that’s helpful. Exactly, in fact. You fool around in one arena and you’re a failed artist, but in this other arena, a monster. Would Picasso have been as good a political leader as he was an artist if he applied his originality, vision, ego, and violence to the political world? He was political in that thru his art, and in his life he expressed strongly held and influential political opinions, but he was not a political man, not a politician, a leader.
Would Hitler’s evil nature have expressed itself, or even emerged in any form, had he remained an artist, and become a successful one?
Ted:
Guernica.
Barney:
Right.
Ted:
So are you saying that one can somehow judge an artist in political terms by imagining how they might perform politically?
Barney:
I am trying to expose the politics inherent in the act of creation of anything – art, ideas, and political innovations.
Ted:
So because I erase the chalkboard before I draw a caricature of the study hall teacher I am some kind of bloodthirsty revolutionary? Is every act of “destruction” really like every other? That difference being “what’s at stake” is not small, it’s not trivial – it makes for a qualitatively different kind of thing. If I hit a bad note while I try to strum “Stairway to heaven” am I really making the world a worse place?
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