Are Tyrants Good For Art?
Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2012 8:19 pm
"The arts have often flourished in regimes we'd call despotic. This isn't because artists and writers do their best work when they're being persecuted - a Romantic cliche that doesn't stand up to any careful inquiry.
It's because traditional tyrants left a good deal of freedom in society. Ancient China wasn't anything like a modern democracy, but it produced some of the greatest art there's ever been, while Mao's China produced nothing. Tsarist Russia contained many kinds of discrimination and injustice, but in the late 19th and early 20th Century it was in the vanguard of literature, painting, music and dance. The Soviet Union produced little that was even remotely comparable. The arts flourished in the empire of the Habsburgs, while Nazism produced Leni Riefenstahl's repugnant and much over-rated Triumph of the Will. Whereas authoritarian regimes leave much of society alone, totalitarianism aims to control everything. Invariably, the result is a cultural desert.
Culture may not need democracy or peace, but it can't develop without some measure of freedom - and that requires a diversity of centres of influence, working openly and at times in opposition to one another. Rightly, we've learnt to mistrust any directing cultural role for the state. When artists and writers rely solely on government, the result is at best nepotism and mediocrity.
But the processes through which culture is created and renewed are complex and variegated, and it's just as silly to think that a thriving cultural scene can be produced entirely by market forces. A vital culture comes from competition and rivalry between institutions - state-funded arts councils and libraries, churches and campaigning groups as well as private and corporate sponsors.
Culture thrives on contestation and antagonism, not some dreary fantasy of social harmony." (Underlining added)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19202527
It's because traditional tyrants left a good deal of freedom in society. Ancient China wasn't anything like a modern democracy, but it produced some of the greatest art there's ever been, while Mao's China produced nothing. Tsarist Russia contained many kinds of discrimination and injustice, but in the late 19th and early 20th Century it was in the vanguard of literature, painting, music and dance. The Soviet Union produced little that was even remotely comparable. The arts flourished in the empire of the Habsburgs, while Nazism produced Leni Riefenstahl's repugnant and much over-rated Triumph of the Will. Whereas authoritarian regimes leave much of society alone, totalitarianism aims to control everything. Invariably, the result is a cultural desert.
Culture may not need democracy or peace, but it can't develop without some measure of freedom - and that requires a diversity of centres of influence, working openly and at times in opposition to one another. Rightly, we've learnt to mistrust any directing cultural role for the state. When artists and writers rely solely on government, the result is at best nepotism and mediocrity.
But the processes through which culture is created and renewed are complex and variegated, and it's just as silly to think that a thriving cultural scene can be produced entirely by market forces. A vital culture comes from competition and rivalry between institutions - state-funded arts councils and libraries, churches and campaigning groups as well as private and corporate sponsors.
Culture thrives on contestation and antagonism, not some dreary fantasy of social harmony." (Underlining added)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19202527