Perhaps, but the failure of contemporary art to join the fight against abortion is one of the saddest facts about the modern American scene. It was predictable, of course. One of the central intellectual problems of twentieth-century art was the need to assert that advancement in art matched advancement in politics. It was an article of faith: The pieces must fit together; the artistic avant-garde ought to reinforce — and be, in turn, reinforced by — the political avant-garde.

In truth, the match wasn’t very good, as the American communists implicitly admitted when, for instance, they raised folk music above jazz as the true art of the proletariat. But people still believed it, and the assertion of art’s good politics reached its peak in the 1950s — when America’s intellectual elites seemed all to hold the unity of high modernism and high liberalism. And this, despite the fact that the literary founders of modernism were hardly liberals: not Yeats, not Pound, not Eliot, not Lawrence, not even Joyce.

Subsequent decades solved the 1950s version of the problem by narrowing the terms to identify not liberal but radical art with radical politics — a turn made easier by the gradual translation of leftism from an economic theory (which it still primarily was in 1955) to a sexual theory (which it had primarily become by 1985). Along the way, however, art took a beating, for there are things certain art forms want to do by their very nature, which become impossible for them to do when confined by the vision of the artist as radical sexual liberal.

Labels: Politics