Yesterday I wrote an article in defense of what the Soviets called “art for art’s sake” after Metallica frontman James Hetfield controversially declared his band’s agenda to be “love, energy, and heavy music, baby!” Former Pink Floyd lead singer Roger Waters, who declared Hetfield a “prick” who “can’t play a note,” was mentioned mainly for saying “‘I’m apolitical’ is not an option,” a stance with which I disagree. Waters responded:
I’ve defended Roger Waters on speech issues multiple times in this space, and when he gets in trouble again, as he inevitably will, I’ll do so again. I bring it up only to note that his “useless idiot” salvo marks roughly the 958th time a left-leaning figure whom I’d publicly defended has denounced me as cowardly, compromised, immoral scum for failing to endorse their political opinions. But who cares about behaving with class when people are dying?
The problem is the separation of artists into “political” and “apolitical” categories. Propaganda on this score has been so relentless for so long that generations of people have grown up with the idea that art that isn’t visibly “taking a stand” — against the Vietnam War, against the bomb, against hunger, racism, inequality — is “apolitical.” Apolitical art, in the mind of someone like Waters or Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, is mindless fluff and a soma-like distraction that Serves Power by keeping people tapping to a beat while leaders make war and commit atrocities. Hence the idea that art “either supports the status quo or challenges the status quo.”
It’s a false choice. Art isn’t either “political and stuff” and a threat to power, or apolitical pap and aid to tyrants. Great books and music and paintings are concerned with things far above politics, from love and hate to passion and death and the great beyond. It can turn people against wars long before they happen. People who are exposed to great art tend to be improved by the experience in the same way that a parent holding a child for the first time feels inner doors opening. That’s the case whether you’re looking at openly political images like Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808, or subjects seemingly far from politics, like Monet’s Water Lilies series or Van Gogh’s The Drinkers.
You might prefer one to the other, but the presence or absence of political intent isn’t what matters. You just want an artist with the skill to expand your consciousness. People who demand that art adopt a narrow, current political line are like the critics Oscar Wilde complained about who took books and tried to “explain their divinity away.” Of course, you’d need to recognize the possibility of divinity to see that.
If on the other hand your metaphysical world is limited to who backs subsidized housing or opposes aid to Israel, life becomes simpler: your allies are good, and everyone else sucks. Moreover, everyone else sucks identically, since you’ve worked it out that all things either support or oppose the status quo. Who needs things that are just beautiful and make us better people? It’s like Waters says: even the “Mona Liza” [sic] or Starry Night are just paintings, useless in the fight. Practically Trump ads, when you think about it.
Any sane person knows there’s no reason you can’t have art and advocacy, but sanity is clearly suspect with this crowd, too. First it was climate change, then it was food sustainability, then Just Stop Oil, now Palestine. In every case, even though art had nothing to do with the issue, the plan was soup on a Van Gogh, soup on a Mona Lisa, mashed potatoes on Monet, someone’s head glued to a Vermeer, heads glued to a Botticelli. Impatience with reverence for beauty is a feature, not a bug. Down with pretty things! Down with catchy tunes! Is there anything weirder than making a rallying cry of being miserable? What’s wrong with these people?
I think that he has become, comfortably numb.
Roger Waters is desperate to be relevant. Alas, he’s not. He’s also an idiot asshole.