THE LORD’S ANOINTED
Who pays for art? The answer is that at every stage of social
development there are certain groups able to pay for certain kinds of
art. These groups may be large or small, but they constitute the public
for that kind of art, and determine its quality and character; he who
pays the piper calls the tune. It should need no stating that
Rolls-Royce automobiles are not made according to the tastes of
rag-pickers and ditch-diggers, nor yet of poets and saints; they are
made according to the tastes of people who can afford to pay for
Rolls-Royce automobiles. If our thinking about the arts were not so
completely twisted by false propaganda, it would seem an axiom to say
that the first essential to understanding any art product is to
understand the public which ordered and paid for that art product.
Some arts, of course, are cheaper than others. Ballads cost nothing; you
can make one up and sing it on any street corner. Hence we find the
ballad close to the people, simple and human, frequently rebellious. The
same thing applies to folk tales and love songs--until men take to
printing them in books, after which they develop fancy forms,
understandable only to people who have nothing to do with their time
except to play with fancy things.
Beginning with the primitive art forms, it would be possible to arrange
the arts in an ascending scale of expensiveness, and to show that
exactly in proportion to the cost of an art product is its aristocratic
spirit, its subservience to ruling class ideals. Of all the art forms
thus far devised, the most expensive per capita is the so-called “grand
opera”; this grandeur has to be subscribed for in advance by the
“diamond horseshoe,” and consequently there has never been such a thing
as a proletarian grand opera--if you except the “Niebelung Ring,” which
was so effectively disguised as a fairy story that nobody but Bernard
Shaw has been able to decipher its incendiary message.
Many years ago I was talking with a captain of industry, prominent in
New York political life. I spoke of the corruption of the judges, and he
contradicted me with a smile. “Our judges are not bought; they are
selected.” And exactly so it has been with our recognized and successful
artists; they have been men who looked up to the ruling classes by
instinct, and served their masters gladly and freely. If they did not do
so, they paid the penalty by a life of conflict and exile; if they
happened to be poor and friendless, they do not even receive the
gratitude of posterity, because their dream-children died unborn, and
were buried, along with their parents, in graves unknown. “Some mute,
inglorious Milton here may rest.”
It will be our task to study the great art periods one after another,
taking the leading artists and showing what they were, what they
believed, how they got their livings, and what they did for those who
paid them. We shall find that everywhere they were members of their
group, sharing the interests and the prejudices, the hates and fears,
the jealousies and loves and admirations of that group. We shall find
them subject to all the social stresses and strains of the time, and
fighting ardently the battles of their class. For life is never a static
thing, it is always changing, always subjecting its victims to new
dangers, forcing them to new efforts. Either the ruling class is
threatened by the attacks of outside enemies, or else there is a new
class arising inside the community. In times of internal order and
prosperity, there come luxury and idleness, the degeneration
of the tribe; there come all sorts of novelties startling the
elders--modernists sapping the old time creeds, and flappers adopting
the vices of men.
Such evils must be corrected; such enemies of the tribe must be put
down; and in the course of these labors, what chance is there that the
ruling classes will fail to make use of their most powerful weapon, that
of art? There is simply no chance whatever. Ogi will be called on by his
masters; or else he will act of his own impulse--he will lead the
crusade, singing the praises of the old time ways, “idealizing” the
ancestral heroes, the holy saints and the founding fathers, and pouring
ridicule upon the bobbed heads of the flappers. The critics will leap to
Ogi’s support, hailing him as the Lord’s own anointed, a creator of
masterpieces, dignified, serene, secure in immortality. This is art, the
critics will aver, this is real, genuine, authentic art; while out there
in the wilderness somewhere howls a lone gray rebellious wolf, attacking
and seeking to devour everything that is beautiful and sacred in
life--and the howling of this wolf is not art, it is vile and cheap
propaganda.
The critics are certain that the decision is purely a question of
aesthetics; and we answer that it is purely a question of class
prestige. They are certain that art standards are eternal; and we answer
that they are blown about by the winds of politics. Social classes
struggle; some lose, and their glory fades, their arts decay; others
win, and set new standards, according to their interests. The only
permanent factors are the permanent needs of humanity, for justice,
brotherhood, wisdom; and the arts stand a chance of immortality, to the
extent that they serve such ideals.