Write Wingers, Ctd

Responding to Adam Kirsch and Adam Bellow on the subject of conservative fiction, Douthat argues provocatively that there aren’t enough bad conservative artists out there:

[T]o be truly great, truly lasting, a novel or any other exercise in storytelling has to transcend cliches and oversimplifications, has to capture something of the deep complexity of human affairs. So at a certain level of seriousness or genius, the problem-or-is-it of conservative underrepresentation in the contemporary arts melts away, because you’re dealing with a range of creators whose talents effectively transcend partisanship and ideological fixations …. It’s that mass-market territory that more often vindicates Jonathan Chait’s powerful argument about the essential liberalism of the culture industry; it’s there that you’ll find the big-business bad guys and multicultural preachiness and paranoid stylings and caricatures of religious conservatives and Ted Mosby-ian sexual assumptions and enviro-propaganda that the right tends, understandably, to react against with anti-Hollywood fury or resigned frustration.

But this suggests a rather strange-sounding riposte to Kirsch’s question, posed after his elevation of writers like Foster Wallace into a kind of conservative literary pantheon. “With all these books to read and admire,” he asks, “why does Adam Bellow continue to believe that conservative writers are a persecuted minority?” Well, one might say, because there aren’t enough mediocre conservative writers and artists at work!

Micah Mattix adds thoughtfully:

Douthat clearly sees the problem with Bellow’s project (at least as he presents it in The National Review), but he seems unwilling to reject it completely. He worries that any attempt to “close the ‘hack gap,'” as he calls it, will make conservatives look bad. (It will.) And he writes that a conscious “conservative investment” in the arts, “as opposed to an aesthetic one, which is how most writing programs and fellowships are conceived even when their politics are fundamentally liberal” may “be foredoomed to failure, or at the very least be putting a limit on the quality of the work it fosters, and a ceiling on its potential success.” Agreed.

But conservatives should not reject Bellow’s proposal because it will make them look bad or be unsuccessful. They should reject it because it is not conservative. It inescapably treats art or culture as a tool, or weapon, in the struggle for power. This, it seems to me, is a progressive or revolutionary conception of art. Even Douthat falls into discussing art and culture in terms of utility or “success.” Part of this is because he’s responding to Bellow’s argument regarding just these things. But it also risks obscuring conservatives’ defense of a proper view of art. … Both should treat art, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, which, paradoxically, also makes it useful.