The Artist’s Obligation is to the Work
By KJP Howes, Interim Director of FAIR in Arts, reflects on what FAIR has come to mean to her as an artist and why spaces that protect artistic freedom are increasingly important. Howes describes FAIR as a community where people can disagree, question, and debate while maintaining civility, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to art for art’s sake. She argues that artists should be free to follow their ideas wherever they lead, explore complexity, and tell the truth as they see it without having to make their work politically useful or conform to prevailing cultural expectations.
“There is enormous pressure today for artists to become activists and for works of art to affirm particular social or political perspectives. But activism is not the artist’s obligation.
The artist’s obligation is to the work. To follow an idea wherever it leads. To tell the truth as the artist sees it. To illuminate contradictions rather than conceal them. To explore the complexity of human beings rather than reduce them to categories. I believe that is the kind of art that needs to be protected and supported.”
AGAINST SELF CENSORSHIP IN THE ARTS
Heather Shayne Blakeslee examines how cultural and political pressures can cause artists to censor themselves before their work is even made. Through her conversation with painter Charles Browning, Blakeslee explores how concerns over identity, representation, and who is “allowed” to tell certain stories can leave artists questioning whether they should create at all. She argues that artists need the freedom to follow their creative instincts, take risks, and explore unfamiliar territory without being constrained by the expectations of the moment.
“In the ’90s, Browning felt that he’d become stuck as an artist, and that maybe no one needed his voice, thinking to himself, “White men have had plenty of space to speak,” he told me. Other white male artists I’ve spoken with have also become so absorbed in a certain kind of progressive worldview about whose voice should be lifted and whose we don’t need to hear from that they considered not making art anymore. I find this a troubling phenomenon, not least of which because the amount of art that should be made is not finite, nor is there a finite number of souls who deserve to make it.”
THE CASUALTIES OF THE CULTURE WAR
Angel Eduardo explores what happens to art when everything is expected to serve a political purpose. Eduardo argues that artists need the freedom to create work that is strange, challenging, beautiful, or simply human—not art designed to “further the cause.” When ideological conformity becomes the standard by which art is judged, we risk losing the experimentation, complexity, and dissent that make art valuable in the first place.
“We also need institutions that are viewpoint neutral, so that the rebels, nonconformists, oddballs, kooks, and contrarians have the chance to contribute something without having to tick identity boxes or fulfill ideological requirements. We need works that stir something in us, that cause us to stop and think, that get us roaring with laughter and seething with rage. It’s all valuable. It’s all necessary. It’s all human.”
Wow. What an arts culture. This fellow Browning must put himself through such torturous self-loathing before he feels able to do gorgeous work with form and color. And the subject must be mocked (as if mocking the subject doesn't reduce the artist and his work). What if the real dumbass was the woodsman's brother who was too fearful to leave the squalor of Europe? What if the dumbasses of America had not existed, to turn the tide of World War 2? What wonderful Nazi or Maoist art would we be contemplating today? Maybe tender recreations of the killing fields of Cambodia? Maybe triumphant triptychs of the Nazi extermination camps, or of the great Russian and Chinese communist starvations? Ideologues and artists are not congenial. Or shouldn't be.
I don't share your love of progressivism, although I understand well your obligation to affirm it in your piece, lest you be the next hunted witch. I hope you survive the nuclear winter that will follow the progressive reaction to your positive reference to a Western mythological figure. I much admire your brave, if tentative, venture beyond the strictures of fundamentalist progressivism. God bless.