Resurrection? The Death of Ivan Illych?
His religious message tainted
> everything and did not permit him to investigate the
> world authentically. The world got mediated through
> the prism of his ideology/religion.
But there are great religious artists. Dante. Bach. Mozart. Michaelangelo. Leonardo. Raphael. Milton. Donne. Bunyan. Pascal. (An artist as well as a thinker). In modern times, Zora Neale Thurston. Flannery O'Connor. T.S. Eliot. (Though I am not sure his official religion is part of his message, as opposed to the paganism he appears to espouse in his work.)
Bellow's a pretty good writer, actually. Unlike Charles, I don't give an artist qua artist points for having progressive politics and demerits for reactionary politics. I'll take Balzac, a stone reactionary., whom Marx loved, btw, wanted to write a book about him, over Clifford Odets or Mike Gold any old day. Or Borges, who at the end of his life associated himself with Videla and Pinochet -- not over Garcia Marquez, who's politically good, but over most people.
Or Frank Sinatra, who drifted from the Pop front to cozying up with the mob, the Kennedys, and Nixon, without signifigant diminuation in thw quality of his work. Or Louis Armstrong, who was attacked for Tomming and served as State Department shill in the 1950s. His work in that period was not up to the Hot 5s and 7s, but that wasn't becuase of his politics -- he was more radical in the 50s than in the 20s. And it is certainly not worse than Max Roach's political work of the day (We Insist, etc.)
I have no idea what Bob Dylan's politics are lately -- to name a fave of mine -- probably cryptic. He hates war and racisl dicrimination, that is a constant. But he has written nasty songs attacking unions and defending Israel and he briefly experimented with the most retrograde form of fundamentalism in 1979-82 (producing some excellent gospel songs, btw -- e.g., Every Grain of Sand, You Gotta Serve Somebody). Is he therefore a lesser artist atht uncompromisingly political Phil Ochs? I don't think so.
More controversially, I recently watched Birth of a Nation with my daughter for her film class. A moral cesspool, absolutely shocking. Unvarnished and unapologetic propaganda for the KKK, laoded with racist garbage, no gloves or sugar-coating, unflinching about glorifying lynching. Genuinely appalling. Nightmarish even. Unquestionably also a very great work of art. Still has a reasonble claim to being the best film ever made. My daughter, Ms. Super-PC, hypersensitive to fault to hints of discrimination, noticed all that was awful in its morality and still agreed that it was a very great film.
On the other hand, good left art is not so easy to find. Mayakovsky. Eisenstein. Brecht. Arthur Miller. Beethoven. Puccini. But a lot of its preachy and dull, liuke Mark Blitzstein's Rock the Cradle.
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