_Memento_: Forgetting Misogyny Re: David Lynch

dlawbailey dlawbailey at netzero.net
Sun Mar 3 02:50:24 PST 2002


The problem with political art is that politics tend to limit the artistic process. Melodies - which are difficult to control - create good songs, not lyrics or arrangements - which are easier to build purposefully. Politics are about defining the universe and art is about finding interesting places in it. I have only three good definitions of art (two are contained in the second sentence): 1: "The most beautiful melody is the one which suggests the most other melodies" and 2: "Art is the new which seems at once familiar or that which makes the familiar seem new." I don't know where they came from. Maybe me. I think that politics, as arguments to an end, tend not to suggest other conclusions than the one intended, thus quashing the suggestive tendency of art. Vanguard politics are new, but unfamiliar almost by definition, tending to undermine the instant feeling of familiarity in the new that one hopes to feel with art. Vanguard politics do help us see the familiar in a new way and that, I think, is the area in which politcal art is most effective. But the political artist will tend to limit the new ways in which he wants his audience to see the familiar, so that's another way political art of the left tends to get limited. None of these are concrete limits, mind you, only tendencies.

I also think that people on the right tend, at certain times in history, to feel less limited by what their art may suggest as they feel more accepted by the power structure and less pressured. Thus a right-wing Lynch in a time of right-wing triumphalism feels at liberty to go wild.

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