“Aht is, er, uh, trooth.” Our pal Scott Nedrelow sent this image along. He reports that it comes from the book Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore.
The text comes from a speech given by Kennedy at Amherst a month before he was assassinated:
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.
This is, of course, why the abstract expressionists were so beloved by cold warriors like Kennedy. There was no “soul engineering” or polemics going on at the Cedar Tavern; just artists charged with that highest duty of looking into themselves and reporting their findings on canvas.
So I’m not completely on board with Kennedy’s sentiment. Art can be an ideological weapon in a free society, obviously, and there have been plenty of times in American history where it has been used as such. This is one of the things I found so irritating about the response to Glenn Beck’s recent-ish dumbass rant on the art at Rockefeller Center. None of his critics acknowledged that there was a kernel of truth in what he was saying; the consensus was simply “oh, crazy Glenn Beck’s just seeing things that aren’t there.”
But while Glenn Beck is crazy and was totally wrong on most of the factual points, he sure wasn’t wrong about detecting some deeper meaning at work in, say, Carl Paul Jennewein’s Industry and Agriculture. When a thick-necked reactionary troglodyte like Beck feels threatened by some inate quality to the Deco art he sees, he is absolutely right to feel that way. He should feel threatened: much of the work reflects a worldview that is totally and utterly incompatible with his own. Glenn Beck’s vision for America is some hellish cross between Provo, Utah, Colonial Williamsburg and Dubai. The modern, cosmopolitan, progressive vision for America that much of the art at Rockefeller Center reflects has no place in Beck’s worldview. It poses a direct threat to that happy vision of a repressive, free-market Mormon utopia.
Glenn Beck would have more or less agreed with John F. Kennedy on this point; art is only an expression of the artist’s semi-mystical “vision.” He and Kennedy (and, actually, the Rockefellers) would certainly not have agreed with Diego Rivera. Or Marc Blitzstein, or John Dos Passos, or Ben Shahn, or any other number of artists working in the 1930s.
