In the film SALVADOR, the
> character played by James Woods is a _total and utter_ asshole. This makes
> the preachiness of the film more bearable, more able to sway the opinions
> of those not already converted.
It is not self-evident to me that art should persuade the unpersuaded. Rather, though it may have innumerable specific functions (including perhaps none at all), its audience should always be those who are already at least tentatively committed to the struggle. It deepens their commitment; it lets them talk to each other about their commitment or their tasks; it may simply entertain those in struggle. Most of the nastier fights over revolutionary (or simply progressive) art all stem from this assumption that it should persuade.
To put it Lenin's (and the 2d international's) terms, art is never agitation, it is always under the head of propaganda, which assumes it is speaking to "the converted."
I think almost *all* the negative responses to Moore come not from his actual films, but from his presumption (especially in the *Nation* article) that his achievement as an artist gave his political opinions or advice some special status. There is no more reason that a successful left artist should possess political wisdom, or be correct politically, than that a successful bourgeois artist should be an effective political servant of capitalism. Bourgeois critics have learned over the last few centuries to make this sort of adjustment almost automatically -- and bourgeois artists have learned that their art gives them no more legitimacy than anyone else as a philosopher, ethicist, political seer, whatever. A judgment or a relative judgment of either Gold or Farrell as a novelist tells us nothing whatever about which one had the better politics.
Carrol