Symposium: Art, Not Entertainment

This article is in response to “Want Truth? Work for Beauty” and is part of the symposium on What’s Wrong with Conservatism and How Do We Make It Right?

I’ll start with a sniffy claim: South Park is entertainment. South Park is not art.

I can’t cling too tightly to that distinction—the categories overlap—but it seems that, in recent years, we have largely collapsed the two. In “Want Truth? Work for Beauty,” Gerald Russello, too, obscures the difference. There is, he says, culture-shaping power to Modern Family and Veggie-Tales and William Faulkner. But I doubt that Mr. Russello would equate the three. Still, he seems to suggest that, at root, the network-sitcom writers and silver-screen directors, on one hand, and Faulkner, on the other, are doing the same thing: persuading, albeit “imaginatively.”

But consider the following gloss on art by the Soviet dissident—and, more important, great author—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture:

A work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force—they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

Art convinces, but does the artist aim to convince? Only, I think, to convince the reader/viewer/listener that the art has captured, “scooped up,” the truth; not to convince of a proposition, a position, or a policy.

Faulkner makes much more sense in this context: Surely he did not sit down at his desk intending to “exhibit the depravity of human nature”; he did not set himself a proposition to be demonstrated in fiction. Instead, he wrote what he saw. He wrote down his vision of the world. His vision was, as it happens, rather near to 20/20—as is the vision of all true artists.

Thus the problem with Russello’s call for “imaginative persuasion”: It turns the artist into an instrument of persuasion, when he is really a conduit for the expression of truth.

There is a deeper need, then, than for conservatives in Hollywood or Silicon Valley. There is a need for education, in the fullest sense—of heart and mind and soul. Conservative entertainers can forward the cause, but men and women properly educated will be artists. And, taking the long view, that will do much more to keep the flame alive.