Art is Good

Last night, I performed at Seersucker Live, a semi-regular reading series here in Savannah, in which writers come and read their work and play silly games and generally celebrate the written word. The evening was an unmitigated delight, and it reminded me that art is good.

When authoritarians come to power, artists are among the first to feel their reach. Why? Because free self-expression is antithetical to the authoritarian project. One cannot possibly expect to exert total control over one’s people when you’ve got those pesky creative-types gumming up the works with their protest songs or subversive paintings or satirical monologues. Absolute authority demands absolute obeisance. Allowing these bohemians to continue their degenerate ways in such a regime would be downright gauche.

Art is good because art is how we teach ourselves who we are. Art is the story of all of us, pressed into cave walls and hammered onto tablets and sung onto wax cylinders. We measure a society not by what they destroyed, but by what they built. Art is what we build. I might even argue that art isn’t the byproduct of a good society; art is its function.

To clarify, when I say “art,” I don’t just mean people who create stuff professionally. I mean art in a broader context. Art is having the freedom to inject one’s personality to one’s endeavors, whatever they may be. Art is deliberate self-expression in all of its forms. It happens, naturally, wherever humans appear. When we have nothing else, we still have art.

That may sound pretentious as hell, but only because I am, in fact, pretentious as hell. But I do think there’s some truth to it. What is our purpose? I don’t mean “us” as Americans, I mean “us” as humanity. I could go into a riff on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, blah blah blah, but the truth is, once our basic needs are met, what do humans instinctively do?

Trump hated this fat-faced portrait of him that hung in Colorado. See? Art is good.

We create. We build stuff and make stuff and bang on drums. We’re the only species that devotes so much time and effort to creativity for its own sake. It’s as instinctive to people as sniffing crotches is to dogs. (In fairness, sniffing crotches is also instinctive to certain humans.)

We don’t think about art as fundamental in our American culture because we’ve been taught to value commerce and consumption over creativity. The artist is, generally, thought of as a foolish dreamer, somebody destined to be a drag on what really matters here – the economy.

And I don’t mean to suggest that the economy is without merit. We need a damned economy and we should do what we can to make sure it’s healthy. But, again, I’m going to argue that the economy serves art, not the other way around.

But art is also a threat to the status quo. Always has been and always will be. Because art, by definition, is the act of defiance. It is somebody stepping even slightly out of line by making something new. You don’t think whoever first slapped their painted palm onto a cave wall didn’t get their hand slapped?

“Stop getting your goddamned filthy hands all over the cave walls, Grog!”

(I’m not sure why cavemen must have names like “Grog,” but I didn’t establish caveman-naming rituals, and I’m in no position to challenge them.)

The stories last night were, mostly, silly. A hilarious Frankenstein-type tale set in the modern age by the hilarious writer, and friend, Jen Spyra. A charming monologue of middle-aged empowerment by the philosopher and writer Kathryn Sophie Bell, which featured the line, “And I did sit on his face,” a tale of a kindergarten crush by the memoirist Harrison Scott Key, and my own stupid story, entitled “A Series of Letters to the First Girl I Ever Fingered.”

So, not exactly highbrow material, but that’s the point. Art doesn’t need to be – and most of the time isn’t – dry and academic. It can be stupid and pointless and juvenile and irreverent. One’s brow need not be raised or lowered to enjoy art. Brows need not play into the thing at all.

Art is what we do. It’s who we are. All of us. When you doodle, when you hum, when you tap your feet in rhythm to a tune, that’s art. Among many other things, what offends me so much of the current administration is its obvious impetus to strangle self-expression, or at least the kind of self-expression which criticizes them.

Consider how many artists Trump has attacked over the years. Name a popular actor or musician and, chances are, he will have denigrated them at some point. A man who claimed he “never wrote a picture in his life” as he did before his now infamous birthday cartoon to Jeffrey Epstein was released, hates those whose talents eclipse his own (everybody).

He has a narrow view of art and its value. Consider his treatment of the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, his directive that new federal buildings adhere to a specific architectural style. His insistence on contributing his own design ideas to the new Air Force One. To Trump, like all authoritarians, art is only a means of expressing power. Its value lies in its ability to reflect glory onto him.

Last night, at a little club in Savannah, a bunch of people got together and celebrated the written word in all of its happy magic. We drank and ate supermarket cheddar cheese cubes and laughed. We were people doing people stuff. And it was pretty good.