When Politics Determines Art, Democracy Ends

 That is the message I get from Slovenia to vote in referendum on artist pension that has fostered culture war (The Guardian).

Posters and billboards hung across Slovenian towns across the country since February have featured an image of the Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar breastfeeding a dog, alongside the slogan: “Change for the people, prestige for the elite.”

Smrekar, 47, said the image is being used without her permission and wrenches out of context a single picture from a larger project, called K-9 Topology, which explores the bonds between humans and canines.

“Ever since the four weeks of signature collection for the referendum, I have received numerous threats and highly offensive messages via various communication channels,” she told the Guardian. “When politics decides what is art and what isn’t, that’s when democracy breaks down.”

 There is a photo of the artwork in the article. Not my type of art, but that is the very point. It will leave you thinking about the relationship between dogs and people, That's the point, so it works. For this, the creator won an award.

Politicians want art to reflect their ideology. Art might have an ideology to reflect the world, but those are not the ideas politicians and their appointed busybodies want the public to see, feel, and think about. 

I see democratic art as coming from the people, reflecting the creator's impulses to create - not work meant to satisfy the tyranny of the algorithm or the despotic whims of those in power. They give to the world what they see, feel, or think, and it is to the audience to say they see, feel, or think in similar ways, or for the world to begin seeing, feeling, or thinking in similar ways.

My own ideas I take from (using Mr. Trump's typography) a Great American, who did believe in Democracy:

The purpose of democracy—supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance—is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly train'd in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing for, not only his own personal control, but all his relations to other individuals, and to the State; and that, while other theories, as in the past histories of nations, have proved wise enough, and indispensable perhaps for their conditions, this, as matters now stand in our civilized world, is the only scheme worth working from, as warranting results like those of Nature's laws, reliable, when once establish'd, to carry on themselves.

***

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable, to counterbalance the inertness and fossilism making so large a part of human institutions. The latter will always take care of themselves—the danger being that they rapidly tend to ossify us. The former is to be treated with indulgence, and even with respect. As circulation to air, so is agitation and a plentiful degree of speculative license to political and moral sanity. Indirectly, but surely, goodness, virtue, law, (of the very best,) follow freedom. These, to democracy, are what the keel is to the ship, or saltness to the ocean.

***

I do not so much object to the name, or word, but I should certainly insist, for the purposes of these States, on a radical change of category, in the distribution of precedence. I should demand a programme of culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the west, the working-men, the facts of farms and jack-planes and engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the middle and working strata, and with reference to the perfect equality of women, and of a grand and powerful motherhood. I should demand of this programme or theory a scope generous enough to include the widest human area. It must have for its spinal meaning the formation of a typical personality of character, eligible to the uses of the high average of men—and not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses. The best culture will always be that of the manly and courageous instincts, and loving perceptions, and of self-respect—aiming to form, over this continent, an idiocrasy of universalism, which, true child of America, will bring joy to its mother, returning to her in her own spirit, recruiting myriads of offspring, able, natural, perceptive, tolerant, devout believers in her, America, and with some definite instinct why and for what she has arisen, most vast, most formidable of historic births, and is, now and here, with wonderful step, journeying through Time.

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas. 

The situation over there in Slovenia:

Slovenia’s populist opposition has mounted a campaign against “degenerate” artists as it seeks to topple government plans for special pension top-ups for award-winning artists in a referendum on Sunday.

Voters in the central European country will cast their verdict on a government bill that details the conditions and terms under which certain artists can claim an allowance to be added to their pensions.

The politics: 

Leading in the polls a year before national elections, however, the conservative Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) has found in the relatively technical tweak to a 50-year-old law a rich seam for a culture war against perceived cultural elites. The referendum was initiated by the party, which is led by Janez Janša, a former prime minister.

Janša, an admirer of Donald Trump who has led the SDS since 1993, said in March that classical art was “being replaced by all sorts of degenerate, unhinged models that claim to be ‘modern’” – his choice of the adjective izrojen echoing the term used by the German Nazi party to denounce modern art, entartete or “degenerate”.

 What makes us human is creativity. Art is only the most obvious. If anyone were to dictate the output of artists, shackles the artist's humanity and diminishes our own. Democratic art rises up, is not imposed from above. That threatens the control over us desired by authoritarian politicians. I will not lean on the right-wingers here - Stalin went about imposing his views on art as much as any Austrian paper-hanger.

Consider the career of Athol Fugard confronting apartheid:  Athol Fugard Was My Hero (AMERICAN THEATRE)

Consider the intersection of art and politics in Haider:

What Indian politician of a certain stripe wants this film that criticizes so well its Kashmir policies?

What kind of ideology wants to confront this piece of music:

What is degenerate then is respectable now:

What caused riots becomes repertory:

Or become cover songs:

Coming from the other end: Banned Books List 2025 (PEN America). What does it mean to ban The Handmaid's Tale?

If you want to be unthinking, unfeeling, fearful of what art can show you of the world, of art that undermines comfort, then censorship and state-imposed art is for you.

Even better, read this from Solstice Magazine:

There are now words that have earned official public disapprobation and condemnation. In some cases, what passes for governmental voices at the national level have called the use of these words illegal and programs based on the concepts behind these words as fraudulent. One is reminded of Orwell’s 1984, where ownership and distortion of language predicates the servitude of the people.

Now there are words that are banished or that will evoke calls of fraudulence and illegality, among them: advocacy, BIPOC, diversity and inclusion and equity (in any form of these words), marginalized, underserved, underrepresented.

If you take a look, Solstice’s mission is littered with a lot of these forbidden words (https://solsticelitmag.org/our-mission/). The movement of the moment, the official dictum from our government on high, is the eradication of factions of society they do not like, but one faction in particular. They call it “wokeness,” but if one had the choice to either sleepwalk through life with nary any consciousness and nary any conscience, I’d pick a thousand times over being alive and awake. There is no other way to experience life’s joys as well as life’s pains but by being fully cognizant. That’s the basis of being alive. That’s the whole purpose of life. The alternative is to be asleep, to be comfortably numb, to be everything more similar to being a rock than a human.

Solstice stands behind its belief that “probing into diversity can promote unity” and that we will not shirk from presenting “colliding, diverse, sometimes controversial, points of view.” We are a community of writers, hoping to be as expansive and inclusive as we can to make the messiness of life come alive. We will not remove certain words, and the ideas behind them, from our vocabularies. This is who we are and we will not nullify our existence. We will remain steadfast. Non serviam. To remain silent is to remain complicit. Solstice will not remain silent.

Gian Lombardo

Editor-in-Chief

What we will get is soulless kitsch:

Ted Gioia writes much, and much better than myself on how our cultural is already stagnating on his Honest Broker Substack. Do read and then subscribe to him. None involve government censorship; I read them as emphasizing the democratic side of the arts.

No, this is the better way to go:

sch 5/10