Art Should Make You Angry
I’ve spent the last month or so watching a friend of mine become something of an internationally famous artist. Back in August or September he started drawing pencil sketches of pictures he’d seen of the disastrous humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. He’d post them on Facebook and Twitter with short messages about what was going on. The White Helmets in Aleppo picked up on it and began a conversation with him. As the situation in Aleppo worsened his art became an important feature of the attempts to display the desperation and humanity of the people trapped in Aleppo to the world.
CNN and Al Jazeera picked up his story. The BBC mentioned him. NPR stations across the Midwest and Germany’s Deutsche Welle reported on it. He ended up on the WGN Chicago news broadcast. There’s probably a bunch of other stuff that I don’t know or have forgotten about.
In November he also got the attention of this guy.
“Paint more landscapes.”
Marc’s response isn’t necessarily perfect but it’s illuminating. It goes straight to Godwin’s Law but avoids an immediate loss due to Hitler. Hitler was a failed artist, after all. He did paint landscapes.
Marc knows art. He knows history. He knows where art and history intersect. He also knew exactly what “paint more landscapes” meant. It was a command to stop trying to speak with art. Landscapes don’t convey a moral lesson. Landscapes don’t force anyone to think.[1]
You can paint a landscape and be Claude Monet. You can paint a landscape and be David Hockney. You can paint a landscape and be Adolph Hitler. Landscapes are morally neutral. They only become morally charged when the artist adds humanity to the space.
During the presidential election Gary Johnson famously took himself out of the race when he responded to a question about the slaughter of the innocents in the city with the question, “What’s an Aleppo?” The standard answer at the time was to mock Johnson and tell him he had no place at the big kids’ table[2]. The artist’s answer is to hold up an image of the suffering in that place and say, “This. This is an Aleppo.”
This is why we need art. The artist holds the world in front of our faces and says, “This. This is what’s going on.” If we don’t allow and encourage artists to do that, if we tell our artists to stop making us angry and just create happy things we miss the clearest early warnings of evil in the world. Adolph Hitler painted landscapes, after all.
I would argue that we, as a society, need more of this. I would also argue that we are asking for less of it and punishing anyone who tries. This gap between what we need and what we experience will destroy us. On some level it already is.
This, I think, is why I’m so tired of Star Wars and the MCU and simultaneously annoyed by people who want to just reject Passengers because it’s built around a character making a morally indefensible decision. We, as a society, just want landscapes. We don’t want art to challenge us. We will throw all of our money at focus-tested pap while actively punishing people who try to tell stories that are even the tiniest bit uncomfortable.
This, I think, is why Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States of America.
Yeah, let that roll around in your brain for a moment. I believe Donald Trump is president-elect because of movies involving Robert Downey, Jr. mugging in front of a green screen. Please bear with me. It’s not as much of a stretch as you might think.
All of this doesn’t actually go back to the MCU. It goes back to the original Star Wars. Actually it probably goes back further, but 1977 seems like a good jumping-off point.
Star Wars is simple. There is good. There is evil. There is the light side. There is the dark side. Luke is constantly warned that if he steps off the path of good he is inevitably going to end up on the path of evil[3] and, as such, it’s best to avoid anything that has the trappings of evil. What does Yoda warn him to avoid in order to avoid evil? Anger.
Yes. Anger. Just…anger. Also fear. This is a dangerous philosophy. If you fear something you tend to avoid it and then tend to avoid trying to understand it. If you fear something without acknowledging that fear and aggressively avoid understanding whatever it is you tend to get angry about it.
So staying on the side of good is all about retaining a sort of aggressive ignorance. It’s also about never acknowledging fear, which seems like a terrible way to go through life.
It’s okay to be aggressively ignorant in the Star Wars universe. Evil always comes in the form of a cartoonish, over the top organization led by someone who wants everyone to know that, yes, they are evil. They build Death Stars and destroy entire planets as part of the interrogation of a single prisoner.
The MCU isn’t as blatant about it, I suppose. There’s moral ambiguity. The characters are generally more grey. But there’s still, at the center of everything, an organization dedicated to evil. Hydra sets out to undermine the good at every turn and stop the heroes just, well, just because. They’re the bad guys and they know it.
We go with it in our entertainment because it’s easy. On the one side you have the noble heroes. On the other side you have the craven villains. Evil announces its intentions and appears to triumph at the end of the second act but at the third good gets its act together and the day is saved.
These are all stories we tell ourselves in order to create our own comfortable cocoon. Evil will announce itself and then set itself up for failure. A select few will emerge to defend the side of good. We can rest easy knowing the good guys will always win in the third act.
This, I think, is why Brexit happened and why president-elect Trump is a thing. Too many people thought they could ignore it, stay home. Someone would swoop in to save the day at the last minute. Not enough people would be foolish — be evil — enough to allow it to happen in the first place. We have lulled ourselves into a false sense of cartoonish, self-evident evil and equally cartoonish, noble good.
It’s all about painting landscapes. It’s comforting and happy and completely removed from the real, human impact on the world. I, as an individual, can divorce myself from the dirtiness of life because I know it will all work out in the end.
I’ve been thinking of Hitler a lot lately. It’s mostly come in the context of people telling anyone who is willing to listen that Donald Trump is the American Hitler. These claims often come with panicked histrionics about the inevitability of Trump’s rise and America’s descent into the Fourth Reich. These predictions are always accompanied by lists of people, demographics, and organizations that failed us on the way to handing the reins of the American state to our very own American Hitler. It’s Hillary Clinton’s fault for running a bad campaign. It’s the Democratic Party’s fault for being the liberal Hydra. It’s Jill Stein’s fault for existing. It’s the Millennials’ fault for being lazy and self-absorbed. It’s the white working class’s fault for not knowing what’s good for them.
Whoever is to blame from the perspective of the panicked one thing is for sure: there is evil in this world and that evil is personified by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. They’ve already written the American obituary and are just filling out the necessary details of why. But it’s not over. It’s not over by a long shot. It’s not going to be over if we can all realize one simple fact:
Adolph Hitler was defeated by the most evil dictator in the history of the world.
On an evil scale of 1 to 10, with Hitler being 10, Joseph Stalin was a 12. He killed so many of his people that we don’t even try to estimate the number with any precision. During World War II the Germans killed nearly 6 million Jews and another 5 or 6 million civilian noncombatants. Josef Stalin was responsible for something in the neighborhood of 50 million deaths. Millions more were forced to live in the gulags.
The United States and Great Britain knew that Stalin was a murderous dictator during World War II. They also knew that they needed him to defeat Hitler. So they worked with him. They planned offensives with him. They sent him planes and tanks and ammunition.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill knew one thing that we have apparently forgotten in modern society. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. When faced with an implacable foe and offered help from a tainted source if you decide to hang on to your own purity at all costs then you will consign yourself to an eternity as a beautiful corpse.
I don’t believe that Donald Trump is Hitler. I don’t believe that the people who voted for him are Nazis. I believe that most people who support Trump do so out of a belief that there is something broken in America that Barack Obama couldn’t fix. I believe that most people who support Trump do so because they genuinely believe that the world is ending.
What I do believe is that there are people out there with honeyed tongues who drip poison into the ears of anyone who is willing to give them an audience. These people have spent decades shouting about how evil liberals and minorities are taking everything, including the very essence of the country. They are well-versed in the language of the implacable evil and the band of plucky superheroes, but in their world the liberals and minorities are the evil Empire and the conservative, white patriots are the Jedi. We know the names of these silver tongued deceivers: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon, Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, and Tomi Lahren.
I truly believe that if we want to make it through these next few years we’re going to need to unleash our artists. We’re going to need a thousand Marc Nelsons to find a way to illustrate the lives of young, black men in Chicago and Baltimore cut short by a hail of bullets and the minds of children in Flint, Michigan poisoned by leaden water. We’re going to need to find a way to show that the poor people in rural areas surrounded by shuttered factories and the poor people in the inner cities surrounded by burned-out buildings and the young suburbanites with six-figure college debts and no job prospects have all been lied to and left behind by a world that has changed while the pat and simple answers for how to get by have remained the same. We’re going to need all of the people who by falling apart into their own circles of purity allowed this to happen to realize that only in coming together can we fix it.
We’re going to need to realize that if Roosevelt and Churchill could work with Stalin then the Bernie Bros and Steinbots and Clintonistas can work together and welcome anyone who voted for Trump only to realize that he’s really going to make sure they don’t have health insurance anymore. These are our friends and relatives and neighbors and co-workers. They might have made a bad decision but that doesn’t make them Joseph Stalin. We ruin our ability to create change when we conflate our friends and neighbors with the absolute worst humanity has offered. We do even more damage when we think that our own personal purity is so great that we can’t ever work with anyone who doesn’t measure up.
If we want to reach that point we’re going to need a hell of a lot of art from here on out. More than that we’re going to need a hell of a lot of fearless, honest art. We’re going to need art that reminds us of who we are and how we’re different and the same and terrified and brave. We’re going to need to stop telling our artists to show us what we want to see and start telling them to show us what we need to see. When we’ve done that we’re going to need to stop getting mad at our artists if they show us something we don’t like and start getting mad at the people and the conditions and the convenient lies that create those things in the first place.
Let’s stop asking for landscapes and start asking for art that makes us angry.
Let’s start acting on that anger. Anger doesn’t lead to the dark side. Anger leads to action. Action leads to change. We need to change a whole lot of shit right now.
Edit: I just found out that Marc himself wrote a piece about how he’s trying to use art to teach his students today. Go read it.
[1]This is not entirely true. David Hockney and JMW Turner come to mind immediately as artists who did use landscapes to try to make a statement and encourage thinking. It’s fairly easy to miss the intended message in a landscape as it’s easy to just say, “Look at the pretty trees,” and move on.
Marc himself doesn’t actually think there’s anything wrong with landscapes. He’s painted a bunch and they’re pretty great.
[2]Although it occurs to me that no one asked Donald Trump the same question. I suspect his answer would have been no more informative than Johnson’s.
[3]Oh, right. This does go back further. Something something religion…
Those who have read things that I’ve written before might be thinking, “Why does the name Marc Nelson ring a bell?” It could be because before he became an internationally famous artist I commissioned a piece of art from him for my sci-fi project and ended up with this.
I have another friend who is a talented illustrator from whom I have commissioned a different piece for a completely different project that I plan on revealing to the world in about a month. It’s fun having talented and artistic friends, no?
All of that is to hopefully whet your appetite for more things both from me and my talented artist friends. In the meantime I hope you enjoyed this article. Like and share if you did. Feel free to leave a tip if you’re so inclined.
