Why does every piece of “Conservative art” inevitably turn out to be cringe-inducing pabulum or hamfisted kitsch?
Spencer Klavan, son of best selling author Andrew Klavan, takes a crack at the answer and suggests some solutions.
For as long as I’ve been alive and longer, the Right has had a culture problem. I can’t remember a time when conservative journals didn’t occasionally publish essays urging movement stalwarts to divert just a bit of their focus away from policy activism and toward stylish artistic ventures. But it seems like this is always a losing battle. Occasionally a top-tier show or movie like John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place will flash a couple tantalizing moments of family prayer across the screen. Then the members of a huge, beleaguered, and chronically underserved audience demographic—normal people—jump up eagerly like broken-spirited abuse victims in hopes that “the tide is turning.” It is not.
The gentle haze of default social progressivism continues wafting unbroken in the background of most big-ticket pop art. For every Chris Pratt sermon at the MTV awards, ten more nature documentaries about gay flamingoes are greenlit. There are various reasons why the silent majority continues to sit and take this in its charmingly but unproductively silent way.
Related: Conservative Creatives
For one thing, there’s a general skittishness among donors about funding inherently unruly ventures like art: conservative investors recoil, writes Michael Anton, from “spending money in ways and on things that everyone else hasn’t been funding for the last fifty years.” And there’s of course an entire network of industrial-strength machinery grinding in exactly the opposite direction—well-established backers and iconic studio brands pumping out one Star Wars girlboss after another cartoon about climate change. Derivative though these products may be, you’re not going to compete with them.
But that raises an uncomfortable question: why not? Why do skilled artists keep making, and the general public keep consuming, works of culture both high and low that communicate a bottomless contempt for the religious practices, national ideals, and sexual mores that built the country? The highest-grossing movie in America last year culminated in a dog’s breakfast of warmed-over, second-wave feminist sloganeering that would have sounded tired coming from the mouth of Gloria Steinem in 1968. The woman who wrote it will now be directing The Chronicles of Narnia for Netflix.
This is a delicate subject. De gustibus non est disputandum is a principle as old as the hills, and though it’s well translated as “there’s no accounting for taste,” it also carries the hint that “there’s no arguing about taste.” The implication is less that there’s no such thing as right or wrong in matters of taste, and more that trying to prove yourself right and the other guy wrong is unlikely to get you far or make you many friends. “To each his yum, and let no man yuck it” would be a decent modern update, striking an appropriately defensive note.
And God knows conservatives of every persuasion have suffered more than enough abusive caricature for their supposedly boorish, unrefined sensibilities. You don’t have to subject yourself to NPR to experience this snobbery: the call is also coming from inside the house. Just mill about Dimes Square, if that reference isn’t already hopelessly outré, and note the exasperation with which the dandies of the “dissident Right” describe their fellow travelers from the Shire. Meanwhile, those beloved of the reigning uniculture get away with all manner of crimes against fashion. Just look, I implore you, at what they’ve done to the gay flag.
It would be needlessly cruel to multiply examples. But all conservatives in the arts know that a major sector of the audience they’re trying to reach will go in for the most appalling kitsch if it’s slathered in red, white, and blue. Without disdaining them for this, it’s important we be honest that they are wrong about the quality of such products as Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” or Natasha Owens’s “The Chosen One.” Wrong not in a moral or spiritual sense, perhaps, but in the sense that aesthetic quality is not arbitrary, and not everyone’s judgment is as good as everyone else’s.
That audience sector has a name, and its name is Boomers.
Related: Conservative NPCs
We have to be able to admit this and talk about it—because it’s true, because denying it creates perverse incentives, and because no really healthy artistic culture can flourish without a discerning public or a patronage class with taste. If you want donors to fund enterprises that will create, publicize, and reward achievement in the arts, you need people who know what that is.
There it is: Patronage.
You may have noticed from his use of shopworn phrases like “silent majority” that Klavan thinks we’re still living in 1996.
But his allusion to the lack of a discerning public rings true. Because there no longer is an “American public.” Instead, we’re inmates in an open-air version of the prison fom The Dark Knight Rises.
Klavan’s other mistake is, as usual, a priori accepting the enemy’s frame—this time, regarding criteria for judging good art, which are not reducible to mere matters of subjective taste.
It shouldn’t be controversial for Conservatives to affirm that artistic standards are objective. After all, that’s what art is: work performed to a standard.
Once you understand the problem, the solution presents itself.
Ancient Egypt had the longest-lasting civilization on record, in part because their rulers knew the value of art and enforced correspondingly strict guidelines on artists. Western art attained its greatest heights under the patronage of Christian princes and the Church herself. What’s needed now is a new class of patrons who acknowledge Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. And they need to bring their resources to bear reviving the arts.
Related: “Hollywood Is in Shambles”
But “to each his own” is not really a very conservative principle. It’s the post-modernists who use the variety of human interests as license to infer that no one can possibly judge between Duruflé’s “Ubi Caritas” and Cardi B’s “Bongos.” More traditionally-minded folks know, or ought to know, that beauty is a thing that exists, like light, and that we have faculties for perceiving both. As the eyes see brightness, so taste registers excellence in matters literary, musical, and figurative.
Conservatives are in friendly territory here, though it may not feel that way. The best starter pack for thinking about taste is an essay by none other than Edmund Burke, who makes a useful distinction between learning to see distinctly what something is (a faculty of perception) and evaluating whether it’s any good at being that thing (a faculty of judgment). It’s important that they go in that order. Before you even think about judgment you have to perceive what an artist is doing or trying to do—then you can decide whether he succeeds at doing it and, for that matter, whether it’s a good thing to do in the first place.
He almost had it that time. But instead of just admitting “Beauty is objective because it’s a transcendental property founded in God,” Klavan retreats into a cloud of Burkean squid ink. He has to, because Conservatism is just a form of retrograde Liberalism. And the core tenet of Liberalism is “To each his own.”
Seeing these Conservative intellectuals flailing around like robots caught in a logic loop never gets old.
There is one area, though, where the Right exhibits pretty good taste, and that’s online. It’s well known at this point that the world of young dissidents is a carnival of memery, renegade publishing, and tech-enabled artistic experimentation. Like most artists, the impish Bohemians of what was once called the New Right are more instinctively creative than they are philosophically rigorous. Some of them have ventured into intellectual territory that is genuinely sinister or simply fruitless. This has caused some justified concern among elder statesmen, who have seen bad ideas come and go and know a dead end when they see one.
But the meeting between established conservative worthies and chic young guns has also been hampered by an unwillingness on the worthies’ part to let artists be artists. Why there is not already a Peachy Keenan sitcom in production, for instance, is beyond me, but I suspect it’s once again a matter of taste. We want Conservative Art™, not art by conservatives. We want morality tales in recognizable and safe formats that lead us to exactly the conclusions we already held. And no swearing, please.
Look, the reason why Conservative billionaires aren’t giving money to artrists who don’t hate them is simple.
An institution is what it does. If Con Inc. considered funding indie film makers, newpub authors, and anti-Woke YouTubers its job, they would have done it by now.
Instead, they pay guys like Klavan to write long-winded essays about why the guys who fund him should back indie creators instead.
Now ask yourself: If anyone with any say in the matter was expected to take these kinds of articles seriously, would they ever get written?
The question asnswers itself.
Related: If Conservatives Fought
It has felt for a while as if everyone I meet has a screenplay, or an idea for a new media organization, or a novel they want to get published. Many of these ventures are perfectly worth pursuing; many of them are run by friends of mine and have achieved considerable success. But I’m not sure that more of them is what’s most desperately needed on the Right.
Instead, the Right awaits its Cardinal Borghese: someone who not only wants to fill his villa with sculptures, but knows how to pick a real corker. You don’t get a Bernini without a Borghese, and you don’t get a Borghese without a society that trains its best and brightest to tell good art from bad. Our universities sure won’t do it, so we’ll have to do it ourselves—in families, in local associations, and in those schools we staff with our best scholars. Some of us need to be making art, that’s true. But far more of us need to be learning how to appreciate art, both for its own sake and because it will make us more effective operators in the media world. You can’t spell counter-culture without culture.
Klavan may not recognize the full implications of his conslusion. Or he knows his bosses won’t take them seriously. But even if it’s for the wrong reasons, he’s right.
The solutions the Right needs to save the arts from Conservative Art™ are:
- A confessional integralist state
- Neopatronage
And as Providence would have it, we’re getting both.
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I would love to see Holy Mother Church open her coffers again to patron artists. It hasn’t been on the forefront of my mind for a while because on the surface it sounds like a pipe dream but with the recent stirring of the faithful in the past few years, I’d say it’s more in the realm of possibility now. I don’t see Pope Francis being the one to initiate this, but I could see his successor doing it. Unleashing the Catholic arts would be the icing on the cake to what’s in development currently.
We wouldn’t even need a Papal decree. Individual bishops could do it.
After Rupnik, I think bishops are going to be very hesitant about commissioning art for a while.
The problem is bishops still do patronize the arts. Unfortunately it quite often results in monstrosities like the LA Cathedral. We happen to have recently gotten a new cathedral, which is beautiful, because the bishop at the authorized a copy/paste of medieval Italian architecture. The clerics are wearing the height of medieval Italian clothing inside them, so it all works out.
The article mentioned Boomers and in that regard, we’re coming off a 20th century problem in art patronage. People with money aren’t looking to build truly beautiful, but some ridiculous cost saving “impression” of it, largely for personal reasons.
We need more bishops with taste, that’s all. They’re in the pipeline I think.
Woke: “Artistic taste is subjective lol.”
Bespoke: “These are the elements of storytelling that tug at people’s emotions, and these are the elements of color theory that create clarity and draw the human eye to whatever you want it to see.
“With great power comes great responsibility, so use what I’ve taught you to lead your patrons into Heaven instead of Hell.”
Clarity is indeed one of the criteria, along with symmetry, proportion, and integrity.
Integrity as an element of visual art? Tell me more!*
*Or link me to a good essay.
Aka wholeness/completeness.
The post I wrote today dovetails into this very thing. I linked a two and a half hour stream of nothing but new FPS games made by indie developers outside AAA, and they’ve managed to create an entire ecosystem of their own. If they had any outside backers and support, they would have the means to take over the field for themselves and put AAA out to pasture tomorrow.
It’s the same in pretty much any field. You have a dead industry floating by on the rusted mechanism created by better men, and then you have flocks of mavericks struggling to turn eyes towards their own work. We don’t have an artist or audience problem, we have a patron problem.
The issue is that money men in the 21st century have no interest in the arts on any level. Everything would be turned around by tomorrow if they did. Everyone has to work together if they want a better scene of art and entertainment, but that can’t happen unless everyone strives for it. Right now they are the only ones not pulling their weight.
Exception: I would heartily recommend the naval fantasies of George Bryan Polivka, especially Blaggard’s Moon, which is a thorough examination of a world stacked toward evil with powerfully compelling characters placed at every possible angle of that question. The pirate king who deals a strong, smooth blend of coercion and temptation. The strong, good vigilante who shows signs of falling into unmitigated bloodlust. The savvy young woman who uses her wits and social graces to get by but finds it lands her in an untenable dilemma. And the Rylands, who start the story as corrupt business magnate and wastrel son but become quite different figures by the end for good and ill, are most compelling of all – but there’s no discussing them without spoilers.
Probably not a coincidence that his portrait of the priesthood defaults to a Catholic model, though. Evangelical or no, you need to drink deep at truth and beauty to produce it to the extent Polivka does.
An issue that I think runs parallel to this discussion on “Conservative” art is the fact that Conservatism is fundamentally an Evangelical Christian movement, at least in terms of constituency.
Evangelicalism is the most artistically bankrupt form of Christianity that has ever existed, and it completely encompasses the notion of art-as-thinly-veiled-propaganda brought up here. Just look at Evangelical films like God’s Not Dead, Fireproof, the popular literature (Left Behind!), and so on.
The only arts where Evangelicals did okay was in contemporary music, there were some good Christian rock bands back in the 80s and 90s, before the odious “Praise/Worship” genre devoured them. There are still good Christian bands today descended from classic CCM in fact, but they mostly operate in niche genres like metal, hardcore, and associated styles. The reason why some CCM was good is because those artists saw themselves as Christians who happened to make music which could be informed by their faith, rather than proponents of an ideological message.
All this is in striking contrast to Catholics; John C Wright is one of my favorite contemporary authors (though in fairness, he did a lot of writing before he became Christian.) There’s you, Brian, and adjacent writers like David V Steward and JD Cowan, just to name a few immediate examples, to say nothing of obvious greats like JRR Tolkein or Mel Gibson. Everything I’ve read from you guys does not have any of the problems inherent in Evangelical fiction.
As an Orthodox Christian I’ve been surprised here, too: even though Orthodox Christianity has a small presence in the US compared to Evangelicals, there’s still a vibrant community of real artists. We have figures like Jonathan Pagaeu doing striking visual arts, Andrew Gould doing architecture and visual design, Nicholas Kotar writing fantasy fiction, to name a couple off the top of my head; plus all the great Orthodox writers of the past, like Dostoevsky.
Since Evangelicalism is a reactionary movement that arose in response to the liberalization of mainline Protestant denominations in the late 19th-early 20th century, it’s not surprising to see it blur the lines with the Conservative movement. Evangelicalism is defined by being in conflict with secular ideologies and movements, much more than what it’s positively “for.” Of course, since you can have a room of people calling themselves Evangelicals where some are five-point Calvinists, some are LCMS Lutherans, one or two is an open theist, and some are Chick Tract-tossing fundie baptists, they don’t exactly have much theological unity. It’s hard for a movement to be “for” something when it’s composed of individuals or factions believing completely different stuff.
Conservative art and Evangelical art has considerable overlap and is often difficult to distinguish, but they both have the exact same problems. I can’t even think of anything which I would describe as art that is both “Conservative” and Catholic, for example, which I think reinforces the point (though maybe it does exist and I just don’t know it.)
To frame it more positively, I think that as serious Christianity in American becomes less Evangelical, the problem is likely to take care of itself.
[Postscript: despite being popular amongst Evangelicals, I do not consider CS Lewis to be an Evangelical writer, as he has far more in common with Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy than a modern Southern Baptist or Non-Denominational ideology.]
You are welcome.
” John C Wright is one of my favorite contemporary authors (though in fairness, he did a lot of writing before he became Christian.) ”
I encountered primarily him on his blog a few years ago. I suspect his fiction work is genuinely good. However, the phrase “a Boomery boomer” comes to mind. He seems a sincere enough Catholic, but 20th century social movements are near and dear to his heart. They at times seem more dear than offering up some support to fellow Catholics.
” I do not consider CS Lewis to be an Evangelical writer, as he has far more in common with Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy than a modern Southern Baptist or Non-Denominational ideology.]”
It would be nice to be a Catholic someday, rather a Roman. Never been there personally. I do eat spaghetti with a fork and spoon, so that’s something I guess.
Anyway, yes CS Lewis appears theologically is English Orthodox/aka High Church Anglican/aka standing at edge of the Tiber having vague thoughts about Peter’s keys. Most evangelicals do flinch when they find out about the drinking and smoking. The longer I walk in my own faith, the more of issue his own lack of willingness to finish the journey has become. He had access to all the information I do and more. Right now, a sort of avoidance is the very best I can do with his stay in the Anglican Church (already degrading in his lifetime). That said, God works in mysterious ways. God willing we meet in purgatory.
“Just look, I implore you, at what they’ve done to the gay flag.”
But why, Spencer? Why should I care about what happened to that accursed thing? That’s such a weird thing to bring up. And it shows the mindset of these Con Inc. types and why they don’t get it at the end of the day.
The Progress version of that flag has six stripes and five triangles, and I’ve seen some versions with a sixth triangle. All it needs is the latter and one more set of six to fully reveal itself as the latest incarnation of the Mark. 😀
The only thing the original gay flag lacked was an ark and a dove at one end.
Dandelion, Germanicus, Matthew, and Brian, let me tell you all a story about a a man named Gilbert Baker.
Gilbert Baker was a gay Kansan born in 1951 who “was drawn to art and fashion design as a child, which alienated him from peers.” His time in the Army led to him being stationed in San Francisco, in which he found support and encouragement for his openly gay lifestyle from such men as San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk: one of the first gay officials elected for public office in the US. Such encouragement led to the creation of an eight-colored pride flag—which he created to replace the Nazi’s pink triangle—and he eventually found work at the Paramount Flag Company creating “flamboyant window displays.” He designed his displays for such clients and occasions as international premiers, San Francisco civic events, and the DNC.
The key takeaways from Gilbert Baker’s story are threefold.
– For the gay rights movement, Gilbert Baker designed a flag, specifically. In his own words, “I thought a gay nation should have a flag too, to proclaim its own idea of power.” So the pride flag is not only obnoxious; it is the flag of a foreign nation that the Gay Community (TM) hoists to assert its dominance over the nations that it subjugates.
– The pride flag is uncanny. The original pride flag included hot pink before red to represent sex, and it was only removed because of how difficult it was to source pink fabric for mass production. And since the seven-color pride flag would have its middle color obscured by San Francisco lamp posts, the color indigo—which Baker chose to represent serenity—was also removed, which left behind a darker blue to represent magic and a violet to represent “spirit.”
– The presence of a color that represents “spirit” hints at why gay people see the Church and the institution of marriage as ontological threats. Gay men so love their broken existence in the valley of tears that fornication is how they abandon the innocence of their baptisms and regress from their statuses as new creations.
And, of course, it left the flag with 6 colors – a detail about which much has been made.
Spencer Klavan must, in my view, be genuine. What’s driving him must be either courage or confidence in his superior perception, because his father’s If We Survive is the purest example of red-white-and-blue-slathered kitsch I have ever read.
We have amazing conservative art. We just don’t think of it as “conservative art”. It’s liturgical art.
https://orthodoxartsjournal.org/
What we don’t have is “conservative” art and artists competing head-to-head with secular progressive artists *in their own media*. We have traditional arts that have never died, and are currently experiencing a revival, but have no interest exhibiting in galleries, making movies, writing SF novels, etc. But we recognize new saints every year, and there are still people out their writing their apolytikia and kontakia and akathist hymns, composing and arranging anaphora settings, and engaging in lively debate over what innovations are OK and which ones should be trashed. We have working iconographers making a living painting new church naves, woodcarvers and jewellers still constructing liturgical furniture…
The Oscars and the NYT list belong to the other side. There’s no reason for us to compete there.
Personal favorite modern conservative artists: Andrew Gould, Frank Desby, Chadi Karam, Fr. John Finley, Seraphim O’Keefe, Baker Galloway, Aidan Hart…
I see no reason why our artists have to be well-known and lauded on the public stage by everyone. Pop art is disposable by nature. We’re trying for the eternal.
Because it all matters. Everything matters, and none of it should be ceded to destructors.
I’d love a cultural reconquista as much as anyone.
But I’m pretty sure we’re a minority group these days.
Maybe not for long though. Serious young people are coming back to the church in a big way right now… and the unserious are not forming families.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens culturally and artistically, once the dust settles.
Is it okay for this Westerner to not be thrilled with Eastern art? I like European middle age art. I also like some Western pop culture art. I think that’s probably okay, if I don’t go to Greece and start defacing icons.
It doesn’t help that I tend to view Eastern Orthodoxy in the West and in the US in particular as a path for believers to stay safely Protestant. Catholicism genuinely does encourage local cultures to their heights. Orthodoxy is going to naturally insist on a foreign culture under glass. Some modern iconography is genuinely beautiful. It’s just as an aesthetic it tends to remind me of a grandma’s house with too much stuff in it.
You are not required to like it. We can still be friends 😉
But as a participant in it, I find that there is an added dimension of *function* in Eastern Christian art that is generally missing from western art– including much of its religious art. Your interpretation of Orthodoxy in the west doesn’t compute for me, on the inside. But it’s OK. The West, following on Aquinas (who followed on Augustine) has a much bigger attachment to intellectual understanding. The East… much of the art is in service to other forms of understanding: God’s too big to be fully grasped by the intellect, and there are some things that we understand only by *doing* and *participating*. They’re too difficult to pin down in words. Iconography and Byzantine music in particular are very much a part of that, and it is easy to feel uncomfortable (not fully embrace, etc) with the style of the thing, when you are not engaging with it on anything but an aesthetic level.
This is why I continue to be a chanter, even though I *hate* singing in public. It’s what the music *does to me*. I wish I could explain that but… uh… (flails for words). It’s ineffable, OK?
I think the Romans still preserve some of that in Gregorian chant, and in some of the old cathedral architecture. Probably in other areas as well, though not being Catholic I’m just not as familiar with it. What I can say is… when I first joined up over fifteen years ago, I didn’t *get* the art or music either. It was weird. So I hear you. But after living with it, and participating in it, for ten years or so, that’s changed. It becomes part of the furniture in one’s head, and then, suddenly one day it’s like Oh, that’s why we do it that way. It’s a package deal in which all parts point toward salvation.
IMO the west could use a bit more of that. Back in my “searcher” days when I wanted badly to be in church– any church– and was visiting *everywhere* looking for a church to be a part of… I visited a RC church. They ended the mass with some hymn awkwardly shoehorned into a Simon and Garfunkel tune. Maybe I should have given it another shot, but I left disheartened and Xed it off my list. This was clearly not a serious religion.
I know now there are a lot of RCs who’ve been fighting against that sort of thing… and maybe winning. But, you know, in the meantime, I stepped into an Orthodox church, and the rest is history.
I do really like a broad swath of medieval art as well– from the early illumined manuscripts up through Bruegel. There’s a liveliness and humanity to it that is largely missing from later art.