Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  Liberal institutions and the power elite, from the media to museums to the universities, determine who is permitted to dominate these specialized fields. The wider society, conditioned to rely on the specialist—whether in finance, politics, or art—for its interpretation of reality, is fed approved assumptions. And this system is perfectly designed to reproduce itself. Universities, by demanding that professors attain doctorates, almost always written on narrow and obscure specializations approved by faculty committees, replenish their ranks with the timid and the mediocre.

  The artist, like the specialist or the professor, is plugged into a system where he or she serves the interests and tastes of the power elite. The choice may be between high and low culture, but in each sphere members of the liberal class dare not risk losing their prestige and employment by defying the structures of power. Playwrights end up writing inane television scripts. Graphic artists draw and animate for corporations. Actors pay the rent doing commercials and voiceovers. Filmmakers, editors, and writers sell themselves to corporate advertising agencies. And those on the upper end of the cultural spectrum, the tenured professors and cultural critics, the lauded poets and art historians, speak and write only for one another like medieval theologians. Artistic expression, like scholarship, is sustained by a system of interlocking, exclusive guilds. And those who insist on remaining independent of these guilds, such as the documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman, are locked out. Those who write, think, paint, film, or sculpt in ways that defy the specialists or the demands of commercialized mass culture must break from the institutions run by the liberal class.

  Alan Magee, whose powerful images and sculptures of war and physical abuse explore the depravity of violence, entered the Illustration Department at the Philadelphia College of Art in 1967. He had no special interest in illustration. The department, however, was a place where art students were permitted to make representational paintings without apology. Fine-arts departments throughout the country, leaning toward the abstract and conceptual, saw representational art as by nature illustration. Those who gravitated to representational art were usually pegged as illustrators.

  “As an art student I was searching for a language within the realist tradition that could carry contemporary ideas and issues,” Magee told me.11 “Surrealism provided one example of how representational art could communicate. I looked carefully at Magritte, and also at George Tooker, Philip Pearlstein, and the Canadian painter Alex Colville. Three paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—Salvador Dalí’s [Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)], Jan van Eyck’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, and Andrew Wyeth’s Groundhog Day—set me on my path as an aspiring illustrator.

  “Outside our classrooms, inspiring work was beginning to appear in magazines, on posters, in European graphics,” he said. “There was a lot to look at, to admire and measure oneself against. The magazine and book publishers were, by today’s standards, inventive and politically courageous. The best art directors didn’t get in the illustrator’s way, or expect him to keep his eccentricities out of an assignment.”

  Magee began illustrating in New York in 1968. He said he was given nearly complete freedom in carrying out his work.

  “I would be assigned, for example, a series of Graham Greene or Bernard Malamud books to read and to interpret in my own way,” he said:

  I looked for a symbolic or metaphorical equivalent to the writing whenever possible rather than making a literal depiction of the characters. My preliminary sketches were regularly accepted. The cynicism about the profits a book had to make hadn’t really settled in, and the media conglomerates hadn’t yet acquired the small publishing companies. That happened later, and the resulting erosion of the freedoms I had taken for granted was one of several reasons for my leaving that career and for concentrating on my own paintings.

  “During the 1970s, in the fine-art world, the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd was installing polished aluminum boxes in galleries and art museums, Carl Andre was arranging rows of builder’s bricks on museum floors, and many artists signed on to minimalism, conceptual art, and similar trends,” Magee said. “These movements were no doubt partly aimed at asserting expanded possibilities for art. It was difficult to object to them. But the ascendancy of these opaque art practices did finally cordon off high art from the lives of ordinary people. Since then, ‘significant’ art has become ever more remote and inscrutable.”

  José Ortega y Gasset and Ernst Gombrich, Magee said, warned that modern art could evolve into a dehumanized enterprise. Ortega y Gasset suggested that intentionally obscure art would be used as an implicit insult to the lower classes when direct slurs were no longer regarded as acceptable. Gombrich predicted that membership in the modernist movement would be worn “like a badge” and that it would make analysis and criticism of particular artists and works of art from within the club impossible.

  “Both of these predictions came to pass,” Magee said:

  I began to understand that art-world “discourses” could not be taken seriously, and I can remember a moment when it became clear to me that avant-garde art was not progressive or humanitarian—that it was, in a political sense, conservative, and was not looking for approval or comprehension from outside its privileged inner circle. I had naïvely believed that the modern art enterprise remained in some way linked to a gradual pull toward decency, a counterpart to various struggles for equality and fairness that were going on outside the world of art. The opposite was true. Tenderness and empathy had been banished from “important” art. They were not good for business. Today’s sanctified works of art are essentially financial vehicles—stripped of burdensome humanity.

  “But what is wrong with frivolity, art-world insider games, or with bewildering art objects being displayed in a museum?” Magee asked:

  Nothing is wrong with these things, of course, unless they are piled up as in a blockade to make passage of any useful images or ideas very difficult. What disheartens me when I enter the contemporary wing of the Museum of Modern Art, although it could be any contemporary wing, anywhere, since there is now only one message, which is that a once-vital avenue of human connection is clogged with things that rebuke the notion of connection. I watch people wandering through these vast rooms looking somewhat glazed, half asleep—many of them, no doubt, suspecting that they are not clever enough or sufficiently educated to receive the blessing of high art. It saddens me that they came to experience art in good faith, believing that through it they might become uplifted, sensitized to life, as they would be if they had stayed home and read a good contemporary novel. Museum-goers are being deceived about the breadth of contemporary art and what it could offer them.

  “Meaningful art is being created today, but as painter John Nava commented, the art that’s been chosen to represent us all follows from Marcel Duchamp,” Magee said. “His Fountain, a manufactured urinal signed ‘R. Mutt,’ which he submitted to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, was voted the most influential artwork of the twentieth century by five hundred selected British art-world professionals. Duchamp’s point, intended to repudiate genteel aesthetics and to ‘shock the squares,’ was timely and well made, but it didn’t need to be repeated for a century.

  “My disappointment with the drift of official contemporary art is bound up with my admiration for certain movements and artists that were part of early European modernism—Dada, and German Expressionist art and film, for example—but all the arts seemed to soar in the 1920s and early ’30s,” he said. “And much of early modernism was moral, as John Gardiner used the term, even though, and because, it was brazenly coarse and defiant. Those modern artists, like early Christians, were outsiders. That sense of dissidence may be what attracts me to the graphics, poetry, film, music, and literature from that time and place.

  “I have had to rewrite art history for my own purposes,” Magee concluded:

  Maybe we all have to do that. I have to dis
regard the hierarchies of the art world to make space for artists in all fields who give me something authentic and who occasionally change my life. Some of these artists are well known. Others are like secrets completely invisible to those we call “art professionals.” Among the artists in what I call “my working history of art” are the Czech animator and sculptor Jan Švankmajer, the Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzù, the Spanish painters Antonio López García and Cristóbal Toral, the French sculptors Louis Pons and Jacques Clavé, and the Swiss artist of “poetic machines,” Paul Gugelmann. Then there are the Germans: Adolph Menzel, Otto Dix, Hannah Höch, and especially Käthe Kollwitz. I try to spread the word about these people rather than speaking negatively about the enormous mass of well-funded contemporary art that doesn’t help.

  “It seems to me that the biggest obstacle to the artist of conscience today is not, perhaps, the art world,” said painter Rob Shetterly12:

  It’s the mainstream media. When the corporate media chooses to ignore serious political art, it marginalizes it. Millions of people who might see, read, hear that art, don’t. Their questions, ideas, feelings are not then validated by witnessing them portrayed accurately in art. Art tells many people it’s OK to think and feel unpopular things. Without that assurance, people are often isolated with their own perception of reality and will retreat to official conformity and the comfort of patriotism, even when it betrays the ideals it is meant to support.

  “I often think of the music of the 1960s—Phil Ochs, Dylan, Joan Baez, Odetta, Peter, Paul & Mary, etc,” Shetterly said:

  That music about civil rights and the illegitimacy of the Vietnam War was everywhere. The corporate media had not yet learned that simply by not playing that music they could severely limit the spread of ideas. Millions of young people were radicalized to act for political causes, not by reading essays and taking courses, but by the spurring of art. Art told them their consciences were right. They could trust Bob Dylan and not LBJ or Nixon. Try to imagine the civil-rights or the antiwar movements without the music.

  “This lesson was not lost on the corporate media after the ’60s,” Shetterly said:

  If their intent was to build a consensus good for profit, and that profit derived from war, exploitation, and imperialism, all they had to do was not report on or play art that carried a message of peace and resistance. It’s not censorship. The artists are free to speak and produce. But not many people will know about it. And, because the corporate media, our sanctified free press, is now clearly part of the mechanism of propaganda for the military-industrial-congressional complex, artists have to attack the press as much as the war profiteers and elected liars, and thus have even less likelihood of being reported on. The media hates to have its biases exposed.

  Shetterly’s portrait series of radical Americans, from Sojourner Truth to Cindy Sheehan, called Americans Who Tell the Truth, have been held at arm’s length by the media.

  “I call lies lies, not differences of opinions,” Shetterly said. “I call war crimes crimes, not mistakes. I call complicity of the media in lies and crimes just that. I point out that there has been, and is, frequently a profound antagonism between democracy and capitalism.

  “Part of the bias against art of conscience in the art world comes from a serious belief that art has something to do with affirming our deepest humanity, our sense of beauty, our spiritual connections, our finest aspirations,” Shetterly said:

  Political art may call us to argue, be divisive, when we should be meditating. Shouldn’t art be a refuge, a place for persistent reflection on the finer things? It is my belief that art should be, and can be, many things. If it is about beauty, it must also be about truth, even when that truth is ugly and anathema to the beautiful and powerful. A beautiful still life is never, in a certain sense, irrelevant. But if the survival of human life is in jeopardy, maybe it’s important that some artists explore why with all of the urgency and truth that they can bring to bear.

  “It’s curious that we live at a time when ‘art’ is often described as literally anything the artist or the critic says it is,” Shetterly said. “The media accepts this definition . . . except when the art’s political.”

  “When we think about societies and civilizations of the past, what do we know about them?” Carol Becker asked.

  We know them through their art, which is what endures and communicates the given psyche of the people at that time. When we look at art, we realize that the ideas we’ve taken from it define Western civilization, yet we devalue the place of the artist. We don’t see what they do as legitimate, or even hard work. Take the art work of South African artist William Kentridge. He lived and created works during the apartheid years. He had this ability to shift and pivot the world at a time when no one wanted to confront or question power. So often artists are the ones who go into difficult situations. Doctors and others go into difficult situations in communities, too, but they don’t make representations of those situations that transform how people see the world. All I’m saying is that I want artists to feel they could take leadership in the world, not that their work will simply be relegated to what we call “the art world.”13

  “To train someone to operate a lathe or to read and write is pretty much education of skill,” C. Wright Mills wrote in The Power Elite:

  To evoke from people an understanding of what they really want out of their lives or to debate with them stoic, Christian, and humanist ways of living, is pretty much a clear-cut education of values. But to assist in the birth among a group of people of those cultural and political and technical sensibilities which would make them genuine members of a genuinely liberal public, this is at once a training in skills and an education of values. It includes a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one’s knowledge of one’s self; it includes the imparting of all those skills of controversy with one’s self, which we call thinking; and with others, which we call debate. And the end product of such liberal education of sensibilities is simply the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman.

  It is the ability, denied to the specialist, to turn personal troubles into social issues, as Mills wrote, to “see their relevance for his community and his community’s relevance for them” that should be the culmination of artistic and intellectual vision. Many trapped in mass culture are “gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source.” And it is the task of the artist or the intellectual to “translate troubles into issues and issues into terms of their human meaning for the individual.” The failure to make knowledge and artistic expression relevant to human reality—the goal of the Bauhaus movement in Weimar Germany—has left the public unable to “see the roots of his own biases and frustrations, nor think clearly about himself, nor for that matter about anything else.”14

  In his book White Collar, which includes a scathing chapter titled “Brains, Inc.,” Mills argued that “men of brilliance, energy, and imagination” were no longer valued within universities. Colleges did not “facilitate, much less create, independence of mind.” The professor had become part of “a petty hierarchy, almost completely closed in by its middle-class environment and its segregation of intellectual from social life . . . mediocrity makes its own rules and sets its own image of success.” But the intellectuals outside the academy in the commercial sphere were no better. They had abandoned politics for administration and personal success. “The loss of will and even of ideas among intellectuals,” he wrote, is due not simply to “political defeat and internal decay of radical parties.” The liberal class who accepted its appointed slots in educational, state, institutional, and media bureaucracies had, Mills noted, sold their souls.15

  The New Left of the 1960s turned out to be a mirage. The rupture within American politics was so severe that when the New Left arose, it had no roots. It existed in a historical vacuum. The counterculture of the 1960s, although it attracted a wide following at the height of the Vietnam War, never replicated the power of the Popular
Front of 1930s, which had included the working class and mixed social, labor, and political movements. The New Left that rose in the 1960s, was, as the historian Ellen Schrecker writes, “a fractured, deracinated movement that could never reconstruct the ideological and cultural unity of its predecessors or overcome its own divisions. Even today, what passes for the left, the identity politics that all too often segregates rather than unifies its adherents, lacks the sense of interconnectedness that disappeared with the lost world of American Communism.”16 Protests, rather than disrupt manufacturing or the systems run by the power elite, usually became, as happened in the protests during the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, a media spectacle. The left and the right played their roles before the cameras. Politics had become theater.

  The militancy of previous generations had been erased from collective consciousness. The counterculture, like the Beats before them, busied itself with disengagement rather than transformation. The appearance of decent and honorable political figures such as George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy may have offered a moment of hope, but the traditional Democratic establishment not only colluded with Richard Nixon to crush McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, but also swiftly rewrote party nominating rules so a McCarthy or a McGovern would never again be able to get the nomination. By now the domesticated liberal class, represented in the political arena by the Democratic Party, needed no prompting to defend the interests of the power elite. It was a full member of the club.