Preserving Artists of the Past Now Makes Me Conservative
I didn't leave the Left...blah blah blah you know the rest
I’ve always considered myself pretty liberal.
And while my views have changed over the last few years and are now spread out much more across the political spectrum, I still consider myself some sort of Left-leaning type.
In fact, I always believed that my longstanding interest in and passion for the arts should put me firmly on the left (you don’t see too many right-wingers advocating for arts education in schools or establishing new cultural institutions).
However, because the modern political left has moved so far to the left, I feel…well, left behind, so to speak.
Even with my obsession for ideas and beauty and color and sound, my lust for whimsy isn’t enough to classify me as a real progressive anymore.
I’m feeling more and more inclined to add the term “classical” to my liberal label. Too bad classical music is considered racist these days.
The woke fanatics who’ve taken over the left of today are hell-bent on erasing the great contributions of the artists of the past, simply because these figures - most of them long dead - were guilty of being straight, white, male, or some combination thereof. Or, they made works that don’t hold up to the hyper-progressive Eye of Sauron and are now deemed “problematic.”
They fail to realize that the accomplishments of the past laid the foundation for the artists of today to try their hand at playing God of their own fictional worlds.
They hold creators from decades, even centuries ago, to the draconian standards of today, with no room for gray areas, no forgiveness for the acts and beliefs that were part and parcel of less enlightened eras.
Notice how I used “conservative” as an adjective and not a noun to describe myself. I still don’t consider myself *a* conservative, but because I’m constantly inspired by a Mozart symphony or a Shakespeare play or an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and because I more and more find myself animated by the desire to preserve their landmark works, I now better understand and even identify with that conservative impulse to let what works continue to work.
Until the last few years, I never needed to fill the role of a protector of history’s greatest creations, because there was hardly any need for such a role.
I graduated college in 2011 - which now feels like a lifetime ago in the lightspeed momentum of digital modernity - and as far as I can remember, there was no need to replace the Western canon of music, literature, and film with one that upholds the hazy definitions of today’s “virtues” like diversity, inclusion, representation, and equity.
There’s a big part of my inner creator that wants to break away from Tradition and spit in its furrowed, weathered face; to crowd out drab formalism to make room for kaleidoscopic futurity; and to forge a style so singular and earth-shaking it makes the works of antiquity look like restaurant napkin doodles.
But there’s also another part of me that recognizes that no matter how minds my future works blow or how many faces they melt or how many guts they bust, I couldn’t have done it without those wandering and curious minds of yore who set out to answer the eternal artist’s question: “How can I do this differently?”