Politics in the Evaluation of Art

In advance of my post about the 25-greatest-novels thing, Amanda has a terrific post about Aesthetic Stalinism (left and right.) I think there are two points that are worth keeping distinct:

• The easy cases are when an artist has bad politics, or is a bad person, in ways that aren’t closely reflected in her art. An excellent example is the Bitch article Amanda references, in which Jennifer Pozner attacks Roman Polanski’s best director Oscar, an extremely rare manifestation of good taste by the Academy. (Actually, between that and Ang Lee maybe the best director category has become a way to honor actual movies while the usual middlebrow doorstops get best picture.) Really, being a good person has nothing to do with making good art; for all I know, Joel Schumacher might be the nicest guy in the world, but it’s irrelevant to the quality of his movies. The fact that a truly great film (about the Holocaust, no less) was made by someone who raped a 13-year old is an interesting puzzle about the human condition, but really nothing more than that; the work, like his grossly immoral act, speaks for itself. To make the evaluation of art rest on the evaluation of personalities to not be interested in art at all. The Pianist and Chinatown and Repulsion are not less towering works because they were made by a bad guy; similarly, Pirates would still suck even if Polanski had founded NARAL.
• The slightly more complex question is when bad politics are clearly manifest in the art itself. As regular readers will know, like Amanda I unequivocally reject the idea that art is reducible to politics. A lot of great art has been made by people with awful politics, and a lot of crappy art has been made by people with good politics. (As Roy once said, “I read the high Tory Evelyn Waugh with great pleasure. I read Celine with pleasure, and he was a goddamned Nazi. And let us not forget the ancients, whose own political predilections have been long rejected by most of us. Who would throw out Shakespeare because he was a monarchist?”) Still, there’s one caveat, which is that politics is a component part of one’s reaction to art. To take an extreme case, TCM recently screened The Birth of A Nation, an aesthetically good and immeasurably influential film with unspeakably odious politics. Being pro-apartheid and -lynching does not make the film “bad” per se, but they are part of one’s reaction, and as its innovations have been absorbed into the grammar of film it’s easier to overlook it. Essentially, if something produces a strongly negative visceral reaction, aesthetic defects are magnified. In addition, of course, bad politics can sometimes themselves lead to aesthetic problems. As somebody mentioned in comments below, the problem with the character of Delphine in The Human Stain is not so much Roth’s issues with women (and academics and postmodernism etc.) per se, but that the character’s actions are ultimately not credible; Roth strains credulity to make the point. Roth’s misogyny is a problem when it leads to one-dimensional female characters (which I do think make American Pastoral not quite his greatest work), but it doesn’t always, and whether it does or not matters. (There’s also a mid-range, like Eliot, in which objectionable politics do manifest themselves in art, but gererally–and probably not coincidentally–most clearly in artistically minor works.)

But, ultimately, the caveat is about tastes more broadly, not politics per se. We all have art whose aesthetic qualities we can admire, but in a cold way because they’re not our thing. The LOTR trilogy really is terrific filmmaking in many respects, but I have no desire to see them again, or to try to read the books again; it’s just not my thing. And when something doesn’t have aesthetic merits, taste becomes more important; everyone likes some crap, but it’s particularly idiosyncratic. I suppose that even a subject as utterly uninteresting to me as the sex lives of vapid Manhattan clotheshorses could theoretically be made compelling, but since Sex In the City is badly written and (Cynthia Nixon excepted) acted even by network sitcom standards it’s a moot point. But people with different tastes than mine will find it enjoyable, which is fine, and obviously you’re not going to bother with junk if it’s objectionable in other ways too. (This reminds me; I need to work on my list of “movies I watch over and over again even though they’re not really any good.) So politics, in this sense, is part of one’s reaction to art just like a lot of other personal tastes, but that’s very different than art being reducible to politics.