here is my conundrum, the thing that keeps me pushing and pulling, changing what i want to do with my life not because of the way i'll look like to other people but because of the way i feel about myself: what is the connection between art and social change? can art really change the world? give me examples! and is writing stories (in whatever form) just entertainment? just an indirect form, twice-removed, of forcing change? and is any argument that art changes society just an unsubstantial way of justifying art's existence? lawyers and politicians work day in and day out to change the law: the way in which people are told to live their lives so that we can (theoretically) live in the closest thing we have to harmony. teachers are out there educating children directly, giving opportunities to people. doctors and scientists are saving lives. engineers are forever changing the way in which we go about our everydays.
then the rest of us? with my education and the blessing that is my life (situation), i feel like i am obliged (not even obliged, i WANT) to help. i want to help cause progress. but journalism/writing/filmmaking (my three most considered professions) are always chaff in the creme de la creme of career-ing. in times of war, they say, you will need doctors and politicians and engineers and teachers. you will not need films and storybooks when you are fighting for the mere chance to live. and if these exist in wartime it is because people need entertainment, a glimpse of better life, hope. but is this not just lying to yourself?
and to deviate a little, is art for art's sake just useless? does art need to have a political and social agenda? god knows how many horrible poems and films i've read/seen/heard/written that push annoyingly literal and preachy opinions down my throat. i don't swallow.
it's hard to pick a profession that society doesn't immediately acknowledge, to constantly have to prove myself. how many doctors become doctors for the money they can make in performing rhinoplasties? how many lawyers spend their lives making money with cases about dog ownership and the like? but no one questions that they are affecting society.
art to me exists, as a window into another world (which i prefer to be another mind, another perception, and not merely a fantasy world). yes, it is essentially running from reality. it is ignoring the scientific truths, but it is also opening the mind, it is also more democratic, it is also empowering, an exploration and strengthening of the self. when books and films don't hang on the exterior to impress others. when we are not showing off what we know but acknowledging what we don't know, when we let these stories into our minds, we empower ourselves. because true interaction with art isn't dictated by an outside power. i like my worldview as derived from literature and film, my vision of a pretty future, and i am willing to fight for it. i hate the world as portrayed by politicians. you can say it is reality, but it is only men & manly women that have lost their hope to greed.
that said, i come out of this justification of art thinking, "i am going to tell stories that will change the world, that will make people see" and i write the shittiest preachiest crap i have ever read. but removing any social agenda makes me feel that my art is useless, it is just to make people laugh and then go on pushing further into a cog-future. but the best books i've ever read and my favourite films are not outwardly political. they are like philosophy realized and humanized (unlike a bad godard film, which is philosophy recited and regurgitated). i just feel like i'm not doing anything if i don't write about the political or social situation. i feel like i'm closing my eyes and not doing anything when i try to merge my political and personal self. or try to make art "hard". i feel like creating art is living too much for myself & that's what bothers me. i am not changing anything, just indulging myself, just taking the privileges my parents fought (FOUGHT!) to give me and not futhering it. after all, the publishing industry today is in shambles (when was the last time you saw a blurb?) and the film industry is forever dwindling into "do you KNOW what lindsay did on christmas eve?!" that is what i'm entering. useless.
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hm. to make like godard and recite and regurgitate (and maybe synthesize a little bit...):
what about art as a way to retrospectively understand society? this is probably where art for the sake of art comes in. actually, don't suppose i quite understand what the hell art for the sake of art means. respectables like kant decided a long time ago that art doesn't exist without an audience - so art for the sake of art, i think, should more decorously be labeled art for the sake of humans. anyway, whatever you want to call it, art divorced from pragmatics, maybe: art as a single vignette of a single moment of an individual's experience; art as the masturbatory ramblings of a fade-away librarian's account of sexual frustration in his too-small apartment; art as what was steve buscemi flying as cinders from a foldgers can into jeff bridges's face - it's seeing shit like that that makes me aware of my own existence as a thinking thing, of others' existences as thinking things, and of the thorough enjoyability of this simultaneously individual and universal subjectivity. and it's only by seeing art like that that makes me understand why the pragmatic contributions of politics, medicine, and law good, and why it wouldn't actually be more exciting to live unbound to such practicalities.
and also: any form of social change that's actually sustainable seems to involve a lot of technical planning and scientific calculation that art doesn't address - i find it difficult to conceive of any work of art that could, on its own, provide political guidance. it seems more realistic to expect art to act as motivation/cause for change rather than a prescription.
but what do i know, i dropped out of philosophy of art three weeks into last semester...
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