What's wrong with the right.
The right is unfunny and culturally retarded.
To be clear from the outset, I believe that movement to the right in politics and social mores,1 is both legitimate and necessary. The left has lost its way and is condemned to wander the desert for 40 years if it ever hopes to find its way back to a reasonable version of the Promised Land.23
Also, I believe anger towards the right is not just wrong, it is inconsistent with liberal values, as every honest liberal knows. Right leaning people think differently and have different values but they are building families and communities the same as everyone else. The left does not have a monopoly on decency.
That said, there are two things about the right that I personally, being an incorrigible artsy type, am finding difficult to reconcile.
One, the right is humourless. (Sorry, Canadian spelling there. Sorry. sorry, sorry fucking sorry.) I don’t know why the right can’t take or make a joke but I hope to dissect this topic soon. Just not today.
Two, the right is culturally backward, deprived, “challenged,” call it what you will, which is what I want to talk about today.
Culturally, I have been asking myself since “defecting” rightward what’s going on with the right in terms of the arts, which is (unapologetically) my bailiwick. We’re not finding conservative critique of Hamilton or missives of outrage against the latest authoritarian edicts of art museums like the Whitney or MOMA. Neither are we seeing conservative paeans to the architecture of Mar-a-lago or the poetics of basketball.
So I was pleasantly surprised to find two articles this past week in my favourite journal, Compact.
The first article - punch card architecture
One Compact article is on architecture. It was titled “How Trump Can Make Architecture Great Again,” which was clever, but when I went back to re-read it the title had been changed to “A New Deal for Architecture.”
The article decries the excesses of “high architecture,” i.e. design by a small coterie of internationally famous “celebrity” architects, and instead champions a more modest, traditional style of building, particularly for government buildings.
This article hit a real soft spot for me, and no doubt would for many people my age who grew up visiting post offices, libraries and government buildings of unostentatious design but which were made from quality materials, faced with brick and stone, with wide hallways inside and real plaster walls, bulletin boards and wood counters, and peopled with friendly, helpful civil servants.
The author, David Schaengold, argues for a “federalist” style like that deployed during the Roosevelt New Deal period, when gobs of government money flowed everywhere to keep America afloat. The architecture funded through the Workers Progress Administration (WPA) was utilitarian, solid, but also reassuringly impressive. Classic or classical, and modern at the same time.
Schaengold then focusses on an executive order of the previous Trump administration called “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which did not come into effect during Trump’s first term but is likely to resurface. Shaengold argues the order sounds WPA-ish but did not go far enough to create guidelines or incentives that might result in a unified style of sensible government building.
My takeaway from Schaengold’s article is this: architecture at the highest end, where jewel-box architects can be afforded, is design by elites for elites; the client (government) defers to the architects (experts) who do whatever they want, at exorbitant cost, creating buildings that are ostentatious, flamboyant, spectacular, brilliant even, but that far exceed the utilitarian job they are to perform and, more importantly, do not speak to the average person and their values (the tax payer).
Schaengold gives, as an example of this elitist excess, the San Francisco Federal Building, which I’m picturing below so you know what we’re talking about here.4
The building looks like nothing so much as a computer punch card, if you remember those days, which is imho a fabulous and critical comment on the emergent technocratic state, its complexity, precision and impersonality.
Designed by the top tier architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, the design is everything the culturati could ask for: intelligent cultural critique, philosophical, aesthetic (beautiful).
But it is also indisputably pompous and gratuitous. No one, and I mean no one, is going to a federal government building to have a design orgasm. They are going there to fill out some stupid fucking forms and to be processed the way ginormous bureaucracies process people/data.
Here’s what Schaengold is championing instead, a midwestern post office designed by a competent, certified architect that nobody has ever heard of that looks like thousands of other post offices all across America (and Canada btw):
I love buildings like this!
They have dignity. They do not show off. Quality materials are used in sensible ways. The are not complicated to build. They are built to last. They are straight forward to maintain and repair. None of which can be said for the Thom Mayne building.
So what is going on here?
Schaengold argues that what America needs, particularly now when the elites (including architects) have gone all in on liberal, left-leaning progressivism. Architecture has with the rest lost its way, he says, and the corrective needed now is a modest, sensible architecture, one that average people can understand and feel proud of.
This is a very powerful idea. And power is an interesting thing we don’t talk nearly enough about. You may recall that some posts ago I talked about fascist architecture, the power of form you might say, promising to get back to the topic. I’m not doing that here. But considering that fascist architecture and New Deal architecture coincide chronologically, maybe we have to think there’s something happening there that’s worth dissecting.
Popular or populist?
A lot of people are using the term “populism” these days to describe the current surge of conservatism throughout the Western world, and Shaengold uses the term for the kind of architecture he is advocating.
This word needs to be unpacked because it’s not just a class distinction. Working people who vote left are not called populists, but working people who vote right, are. Populism tends to be critical of the mainstream, to cut against the grain of the prevailing trends in government. The term populism is used by elites to describe protest against the way elites are running things. Populism is a slippery slope word that once used, ends with rabble, riots and jail time.
What does it mean to use “populist” in relation to culture?
This is, I think, at the root of the difficulty trying to figure out why the right is so weak on culture. The parameters for valuing culture are very different depending on who you are: where and how you grew up and were educated, where you work and your social status.
To oversimplify, if you were more affluent (or jumped a class through hard work and/or luck), have a university degree and work in a professional or semi-professional capacity, the chances are you know something about and have learned to appreciate music, theatre, dance, fine art, literature and architecture.
These appreciations are not forced on anyone. Neither do they come from nowhere. They may have innate aspects,5 but for the most part, the 90% part, as we become educated, we move instinctively toward the light. If you’re art-, knowledge-, and maybe class-sensitive, you go to university, you strive and you end up finding a place for yourself as as a “knowledge worker.”
For people like myself, architecture, art, music and literature, are important. They are not everything about who we are, but they are interesting to us.
The United States Federal Building by Thom Mayne is interesting. My life feels improved by the presence of this building, the thought and effort that went into its making. This is undeniable for me. I’m not going to cancel someone over it, or shout them down or assault them, but it is a very important part of what makes life worth living. And I don’t really care how much it cost.
HOWEVER…
At what point does my harmless, well-intentioned idea of interesting become self-serving, privileged, elitist, narcissistic pomp and circumstance. When do I suddenly find myself in an entourage of gold-trimmed carriages carrying the “nobility” through the streets lined with throngs of adoring plebians who may at a moment’s notice turn into a raging, blood thirsty mob?
This seems to be the crisis point we have reached culturally. At the very moment that the rainbow coalition has taken over every educational and cultural institution turning the discourse about power inside out, the right is decrying the snobbery of these same elites for using knowledge and culture to mystify and sanctimoniously enforce their authority.
The Second Article - rainbow revisionism
The second article I found in Compact is called A Tale of Two Museums. It looks at two new exhibitions, both in New York, one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the other at the Brooklyn Museum.
I have to give the author Reinaldo Laddaga kudos for keeping his cool. Both exhibitions would have made me crazy. Existing art is criticized with endless didactic wall texts that condescendingly preach the gospel of colonial victimology. Important, historical (and presumably priceless) works are hung in insulting and demeaning ways, like cast offs. Classification and chronology are ignored in favour of what the new breed of DEI curators consider non-hierarchical and therefore more egalitarian, but which is actually just a disorganized hodge podge.
Laddaga offers this gentile insight:
The general narrative no longer tells the saga of the great innovators, the old geniuses, nor does it accept that there is a more or less autonomous history of art. Instead, changes are presented as direct responses to developments in social or political history.
I must say that I can barely stand to enter a museum these days. I have always carried some critical disdain for museums because they are creatures of the rich, built with their money to serve as respositories of their colonial plunder. One accepts this when one goes to a museum and one learns despite it all.
Today, however, museums have become something altogether different. They have become factories of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) doctrine, reframing their collections and revising history to comform to the latest trends in critical discourse, the rhetoric of oppression, disenfranchisement and victimology.
Nobody is seriously trying to move the critique that is class and economics based up a notch. None of these oppressed people or their advocates is trying to dismantle the museums altogether or bring about Andre Malraux’s vision of the “museum without walls,” where every person becomes their own curator of objects, savouring antiquity and the present however they will.
Instead, we have a new class of “educated” museum professionals pulling respectable pay checks while conducting exercises in revisionist historicizing in the name of liberation.
This is a much more complex game of legitimation than my generation ever managed. But let’s please call it what it is, cultural rationalization in the service of elites who continue to this day to colonize, exploit and collect artifacts from their expeditions and conquests.
To sum up, huzzah to Compact and Mr. Laddaga for critically taking on the museums. It is a very big bite to chew off. The cultural world is completely saturated with DEI doctrine. If criticism is to attempt this, is will have to do address more than the styles of museum presentation, it will need to call out the false narratives that are being presented in the name of pseudo liberation.
Oh boy.
I have still not got much closer to what I wanted to talk about today, which was conservative culture. There is so much more to do.
Other people are turning over the “problem” of the arts in relation to conservatism:
Nigel Hannaford on C2C https://c2cjournal.ca/2016/09/conservative-art-its-complicated/ acknowledges the fundamental problem:
Artistically, the left advocates for revolution and utopia through the avant garde, and the abandonment of rules, restraint and often technique. But does that mean conservatives can only express themselves through formalist, traditionalist approaches to art?
The obvious answer, and the one adopted by conservatives themselves, is yes. But, then again, you have Socialist Realism, dogmatically conventional in technique used to convey highly scripted, leftist messages, i.e., political propaganda.
Hannaford looks at a few artists reputed to be conservative, Andrew Wyeth, Thomas Kinkade and Jon McNaughton6 but in the end throws up his hands, concluding conservative art is whatever regular folk can afford and will actually pay for.
James Baresel, writing in the journal The Imaginative Conservative finds three reasons why conservatism is so marginal in the arts: reverence for the past, skepticism towards innovation and a tendency towards didacticism, which he describes as penchant for the “philosophical” over the “artistic”.
Like Hannaford, he is short on answers but in the end he calls for conservatives to look more closely at art. A kind of keep trying, don’t give up thing.
This is an interesting idea, if right-leaning folk looked harder at what is going on around them creatively, might they not find in it markers of their own values? Artists are not left or right by nature. At least they never used to be.
Maybe conservatives need to learn how to do what liberals are so good at, navigating a complex world through discourse, learning, using and constantly re-inventing the language of symbols and signifiers.
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/08/dilemma-conservative-artist-james-baresel.html
Jack Scott, writing in The Sydney Tory, identifies narrowcasting as part of the conservative cultural problem in this short article, A critique of modern conservative commentary of art - and how we ressurect aesthetic:
Not concerned with the deeper spirit of culture, conservatives have for too long been content to claim anything that has a superficial resemblance to one of their imagined conservative golden ages, or co-opt an already popular piece merely because it has some perceived message of individualism or anti-statism.
Scott is describing a kind of laziness or reticence to engage in culture, a falling back on the familiar, the proven. Usefully, Scott cites two lists of “conservative” movies, (apparently there are such things), which might be worth checking out if only to see how dreadful the state of right leaning art might be.
Answer - new right criticism
It is important to realize that culture does not belong to the left. From Hollywood and the museums to Broadway and the Olympics, the left leans into culture, to the human drama, the tragedy and comedy and, for now, appears to have captured it ideologically.
But conservatives do not need to revert to the familiar and traditional or have their own equal and opposite cultural objects. The right can gain ground in cultural discourse and influence but to do so it has to enter the field.
It’s all in the way you look at things.
I can think of many artists championed by the left lib crowd, whose work is imbued with conservative values. You can take almost anyone, but look at the works of legendary artists like Picasso, Richard Serra or Jeff Koons. They are replete with historical references, traditional craft and narratives of popular, if not populist, drama. There’s plenty of individualism and anti-statism there if you know where to look for it.
It has been the strength of the left to outwardly praise the works of artists like these in terms of cultural provocation (progressiveness) while secretly valuing how these works reinforce convention, institutional authority and systems of patronage. The technocratic state, we are learning, can be subtle, and devious.
To claim its rightful place in culture, all the right needs to do is what the left has been doing all along: engage, look at things, see it their own way, and write about it.
Paraphrasing Gertrude Stein.7 If you know anything about Stein, you likely think, as I do, of her as an icon of the left. But wait:
Her open, unapologetic, same-sex partnership with Alice B. Toklas belongs more to the liberal world of 2012 than to 1912. And yet throughout her life Stein hewed to the political right, even signing up to be a propagandist for an authoritarian, Nazi-dominated political regime (the Vichy government in France).8
See what I mean? Artists and art belong to everyone.
Next up
This feels like it is developing into something. If it’s a series, that will likely mean future posts about:
Conservative style - Wyeth, Kinkade, realism vs. modernism
The power of form - fascist style, classicism and populism
Funny business - why the right has no sense of humour and what to do about it
Conservative critique - Ways of Seeing Right.
Just to recap: when the crowd chanted “no going back” at the Democratic National Committee convention, my heart sank. No going back on trans-mania. No going back on men competing in women’s sports. No going back on teachers fighting parents over control of their children. No going back on EDI dogma. No going back on affirmative action discrimination. No going back on tar and feathering men. No going back on cancel culture. No going back on #meisallthatmatters.
Oddly enough, the Compact article does not show a picture of the building and offers no critique of it “as architecture”. One must ask, does this obvious failing of critique have something to do with the general failing of the right to have traction in the cultural sphere? Like hoping something will go away by not-talking-about it?
I’m pretty sure nobody instructed me, or thought I would ever, cleave to the “artsy” side of life. I wasn’t more into comics than other kids, though I did draw my own, and I was just a little curious about things like theatre, dance, and art. But after a decade or so of dabbling, it didn’t feel like a choice.
I want to and will explore these artists more in the future, Kinkade in particular.
A famous line from a poem titled “Sacred Emily” by Gertrude Stein written in 1913. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_is_a_rose_is_a_rose_is_a_rose