Art in a Fascist Age

When we speak about the arts, most especially the popular arts (movies, books, music, television), one of the things I get tripped on is a consistent drive to hem them in. “This is art,” and “That is not art.” The most common version of this is to speak about art made with the perceived intent of being “entertainment,” and to write it off as disposable, and therefore, meaningless.

The evidence is that the capitalist economics behind the artistic industries creates an ecosystem out of balance. It’s true that when it comes to the arts, what’s available to the majority of the public, certainly what’s given promotional dollars to reach the greatest number of people, is created with the intention of being escapist entertainment. I agree, wholeheartedly, that this is not in the best interest of the industries existing to commodify the arts, nor is it in the interest of public good. This is also what makes me suspicious of arguments claiming the contraction of those industries is simply a matter of technological advance. Like so many things which become topics of public discussion, it’s a too simplistic, easy answer that we rely on because it relieves us of the responsibilities of confronting bigger, harder questions.

At the same time, I reject the idea that “entertainment” is separate from, unconnected to or somehow lesser than “art.” Entertainment is one of the things art can do, one of the things it can be, and to deny that is to give support to the idea that “real art” isn’t fit for public consumption, that the greater public can’t engage with “real art” or there’s no reason for them/us to do so. It gives support to the idea that art which doesn’t spring from the desire to make “pure entertainment” can’t be for us commoners. It’s a belief that we commoners are too dull for real art. It’s not just elitist, it aids in the fascist painting of art as only legitimate if it meets a narrow set of standards. It also says there’s no financial incentive to creating things that have an intent that isn’t escapist entertainment, the proverbial “four quadrant” film or say, music which might be a little more challenging than the most bog standard version of whatever genre happens to be most popular in an era.

I want to be clear here too, I’m not dismissing things created with the intent to embrace a genre wholly. I hear something vital in Gary Clark Jr., whose music is firmly in the tradition of the blues, and I find the solid 1970s punk rock of Amyl and the Sniffers can get me pogoing around my living room or pumping my fist in the air as I drive, howling along to the lyrics while I do both. They move me. That these artists are creating with such firm footing in well established traditions, with a loving embrace of these traditions that had their genesis and heyday in the past, are doing so in the desire to contribute to something they love, something that moved them and brought something to their lives. It comes through clearly, and because of this, no matter how many other traditional blues or punk records I might have heard (and love), they’re still moving. I can feel the life in their music, the love, and that along with the product of the strange alchemy of the meeting of talent, hard work, study and focus to develop the ability to communicate in the genre, it’s what I respond to. I have no problem with artists who want to create in the genres or forms they love. It’s why all of us start making things in the first place. That something doesn’t immediately and performatively challenge genre conventions or consciously try to avoid commercial genres or forms doesn’t automatically make what they’re creating good or great art. Staying within them doesn’t make it good or great art either.

This love, the instinct to create in genres which aren’t new, to try to hew close to their traditions, is a crucial reminder that the past lives in us, today. It is not just a thing of history books, documentaries, and fastidiously researched period pieces. No small part of my education in US history came from learning about the mediums, genres and artists I fell in love with. Whether we like it, know it or want to acknowledge it, it is within all of us. We carry it in how we do everything.

The focus on genre and form becomes a problem when the desiccated imaginations of artistically challenged turds that run the major corporations, having succeeded in consolidating their industries, get to decide what the public is “ready for” and what they aren’t, and that those decisions are so often based on what made the most money last week or last month. An algorithm isn’t alchemy. It is, in fact, the opposite of alchemy, though the AI boosters and mega corps public relations professionals are doing their best to convince us otherwise. The concept of alchemy exists because of some understanding that there is an art, a creative, instinct in the sciences. Algorithms are the product of the belief that there is no art to the arts. They are just various formulas, slightly overgrown equations. Creating art and discovery in science have in common that they are inextricable from questions. “What aren’t we seeing?” and “What haven’t we tried?” “What new experiment will reveal what we’re not seeing or point us to what we’re missing?” Sometimes it’s an instinct to do or try a thing which has a solid vision in the arts, a specific thing to express, where in the sciences, it’s a hypothesis in question, “I think this is probably true, but how do I test it?” Both involve inspiration and experimentation. We might not exactly understand at the moment it happens, but inspiration rises with urgency from the formlessness of the sub conscious, though we may later be able to see and explain it when looking back at the pattern of the circumstances in which it was created. Experimentation is the implementation of inspiration, to see if it works.

So much of the way we talk about the arts today, is in an algorithmic approach to what gets made and promoted. This algorithmic approach to the arts existed long before we had the computational power to create programs mathematically testing our attention and affection for one creation versus another. Like so much of what we see with technology, and certainly what we’re seeing with AI, it’s just coding already flawed ways of thinking into digital rules. This perspective has always tried to act as if the question, that vital part of creating, isn’t a considerable factor in all of this. Record, film and publishing executives have always acted as if the answer one artist found five years or five months ago, proven in sales numbers, is more vital than the question another artist might be asking is. It’s why the history of these industries is littered with examples of executives dumping huge amounts of money into something they were 1,000% sure was going to be the next big hit, only for the public to shrug and pay little attention. The New York Dolls came along and asked a new question, and about 1,000 glam/hair metal bands kept repeating the answer until Nirvana came along with a new question, that they pieced together from The Pixies, The Velvet Underground and a few other influences.

I might love Gary Clark Jr. and Amyl and the Sniffers, in part because of how traditional they are, but I can also get lost in, be moved by, the experimental noise metal weirdness of Buck Gooter or the chiaroscuro, Ennio Morricone inspired oddness of Tulsa Drone, two bands that as far as I know, never reached more than regional success in the central Atlantic, DMV region. All of them move me, in different ways.

Why has Taylor Swift captured the imagination of what seems to be a few billion people, where Halsey has certainly reached a popularity that’s made her a platinum selling artist, but not on anything like the same scale as Swift? To some degree, it’s momentum, a self perpetuating cycle, right? Part of the fascination with Taylor Swift is that she’s not just managed to become so popular, but she’s grown her popularity over twenty years, which in the world of pop music might as well be eternity. Her popularity keeps her music, her name, her face, in the public consciousness, which gives her access to the public, to keep building on that popularity. She’s at the height of her success, her popularity, twenty years into her career. Whatever else one might have to say about Swift, if a handful of experts in American pop culture sat down and really tried to come up with one, a list of other artists who have so well understood how to navigate this would be extremely short.

Beyond that, there is no measurable reason she’s outpaced so many of her contemporaries, and anyone who tells you they can measure that reason was probably selling NFTs not so long ago. Why do I, personally, respond so much more to Halsey’s music than I do Swift’s? Any answer I give would be justification more than explanation. The truth is, I respond to it first, and the why comes later. I don’t dislike Swift. I have nothing but respect for what she’s accomplished, because it is so rare, and I am fascinated by the entirety of the cultural obsession surrounding her, but I don’t respond to her music as I do some other artists who would be interchangeable with her in that algorithmic perspective toward art. You can say you hear the difference, but the truth is, you feel the difference. It is in the notes, the melody, the rhythm, the changes and so on, but what we respond to is what’s between all of those, the thing that makes all of those choices. I don’t respond to BB King or Muddy Waters the way I do Howlin’ Wolf. Why? Again, if I’m honest, I have justification, not any real explanation, and there isn’t a small enough measure of shit for me to give either. I love all three, but Howlin’ Wolf is the one I return to most, and I’m incredibly grateful they all exist and that they aren’t the same, even as they might be in the same genre, began their careers in the same general era, and are similar in form.

All of this has been on my mind recently. It’s a thing I’ve struggled with in the past, and have only recently come to a conclusion with. I’ve been seeing it expressed more often, in different ways. One of them is, “How can you be talking about (insert a tv show, a film, a piece of music or artist) when the world is on fire?” The other way I’ve seen it expressed is, “I don’t know how to talk about the art that I love and not seem frivolous right now.”

We’re in hard times. Times that make the most horrific things in horror fiction seem small and frivolous, because only the rarest story could encapsulate the scale and breadth that is the horror of our looming reality. We have entered a fascist era, whether what we call leadership (for lack of a better word) is too incompetent to recognize it or revels in it and deliberately wants to obscure it so they can advance it. I don’t believe, as many seem to, that it’s the beginning. We’ve been living with a schism between large portions of the population experiencing fascism, and a large portion not being subjected to it, since the nation began. What we’ve called “process” is really better expressed as, “A little less fascist than a few years ago.” It’s only been about sixty years we tried making a real run at being a democracy. It is also, as a result of the technological advance we often want to simplistically blame, a hyper connected era. Those things are inextricably related. All the things that define fascism have been here though, been part of what the nation has been, as long as Europeans have been in North America. It’s not new. All of this leads to the fact that a distorted facsimile of a brain damaged orangutan is in the Oval Office, with an emotionally stunted, Apartheid shaped man child at his elbow. For those of us with an appreciation for history and more than three or four brain cells to rub together, it’s clear there is no way to avoid some grim and bleak times, for a least a few years.

We’re experiencing a firehose of rank inhumanity every time we open our phones, sit at our laptops and read the news, open social media or turn on our televisions. Even if you’re trying to get some relief in escapist entertainment, broadcast and cable television commercials are interjecting it, if not outright advertising for it. If you’re scrolling through the choices of a streaming service, it’s impossible to escape the degree to which the industries surrounding the arts are engaging in advanced compliance to this fascist regime. That’s before we even start to consider the assault on the arts the predecessors of today’s fascist movement have been engaging in since radio was the newest technological conveyance of art to the public. Today’s assault on the arts, on artistic freedom is grown from the roots of their ability to reach people, to recruit the useful idiot to their ranks, since the 1950s, and which really blossomed in the 1980s.

We live now, in times when twin instincts are in conflict. One is to be aware of exactly what new rank inhumanity is being executed. At some level, the majority of us realize we must watch, if for no other reason than to know how soon we are going to be the target du jour and what shape that might take. The other is the instinct to be able to just get a fucking break from the existential dread all of it keeps at a roiling, boiling pitch.

For this reason, the well of my gratitude for things like Chappel Roan’s pop genius on The Fall of a Midwest Princess (the unbridled celebration of [queer] life that it is), for the gory silliness of Evil Dead 2 (the celebration of cinematic creativity that it is), and the gun fu insanity of the John Wick films (the celebration of the stunt professional’s contribution to film history that it is), is constantly renewed. I’m grateful for these escapes, and many others, because they’re desperately needed right now.

Shirley Jackson gave us one of the great opening lines of American Literature in The Haunting of Hill House, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” Stephen King, in his amalgamation of memoir and writing manual, On Writing referred to the relationship between the reader and the writer as telepathy, by way of the writer sending their thoughts across space and time, to the reader. I’m sorry I couldn’t find the origin of the sentiment, the original quote, but one of those rusty clichés about movies is that they are how we dream with our eyes open. They are filmmakers expressing and creating a dream, which is then transmitted to the audience via the screen.

I can say, without reservation, the arts are a direct contribution to my ability to hold onto what we collectively call sanity, and if these dreams by way of telepathy were no longer accessible, I would indeed go mad in that sense of the world which conveys a flight or disconnection from reality. Art, storytelling, music, the creation and consumption of these things which are so wrapped in this strange magic, this alchemy of creation we have never been able to fully categorize, catalogue, dissect, display or plain beat to death, makes a significant contribution to human well being. Despite the often expressed sentiments to the contrary, that to acknowledge this is somehow the product of weakness or defect, be it emotional, psychological or spiritual, it’s clear the arts contribute something, probably a lot of things, to human well being. None of us can individually express it, because the arts do so much, are so much, in so many different ways, no individual can wrap our heads around it. Collectively, though, it’s clear. It’s in this, I think we find that even if it may be “disposable,” the piece of cultural ephemera that doesn’t last, the kind of thing which gets ejected from cultural memory, rendered among the mountains of creative endeavors in the void of obscurity, is not meaningless. Even if it’s only part of the cultural landscape for a few months, chances are it’s helped some of us escape the terms of absolute reality in the way we clearly need to, even if just for that short time. I know I’m not alone in this either. If the fact that we’ve engaged in the arts in one form or another, for as long as humanity has existed isn’t enough, then it is in the fact that we have roughly a few million ways to express what the arts are, mean to us and do for us, we can see there is an inescapable truth to our need for them.

I’m sure the people who’d place Lou Monte’s Dominic The Donkey among the canon of “great American art” are few and far between, but it still gets trotted out every year, because something about it still works for many of us. It’s a ridiculous bauble, a novelty Christmas song, and I still sing it every time I hear it, because it’s catchy as all hell and the depths of its ridiculousness, its silliness, it’s disregard for all of the things an artiste is supposed to aspire to still make me smile. Does that make it “art” in the higher sense, that thing which is connected to some great human endeavor or communication of some higher truth? I could probably make a relatively convincing argument that it does. In truth though, I do not fucking care and I will be playing it and singing along again this December.  For anyone who has a problem with that, all I can really say is, “Yeah, I am proud to be a commoner. I love that silly pablum shit. Get with someone who thinks there’s something pretentious in the fact that my common ass can vibe with the score for Under the Skin, Sun Ra’s psychedelic summonings, Holy Mountain or House of Leaves all day. You two work it out, and we can schedule a time when you can each kiss a cheek or take turns kissing my whole ass. I’ll make it work for whatever you agree on, I’m flexible that way. Otherwise, you can fuck right off.”

I can, in fact, recognize that it’s almost miraculous that Eddie Van Halen created a system of notes and chords all his own and that musically, Hot For Teacher utterly fucking shreds, but the lyrics are horrifyingly misogynistic. As an adult male freed from the sexual fantasies of a teenage boy wishing anyone, much less a more experienced figure of authority, might indulge that teenage boy’s immature, laughable, naive understanding of sex, attraction or anything anywhere near any of that, the lyrics make the song impossible for me to enjoy now. I’m glad I was able to soak up just how much the rest of it shreds when I was able to, and I also question a social order that encouraged boys and young men to see girls and women so completely as objects for their sexual gratification.

When it comes to the arts, shit is complicated, and it’s one of the main reasons I so deeply love them. They reflect us, all the facets of what we are and how we live, in all its glorious complication, nuance, absurdity, ugliness and beauty. They are part of how we try to make sense of it all, while also being among the most safe ways we escape the conditions of absolute reality, which in turn, helps us survive those conditions.

Over the last few days, I watched the four episode limited series, Adolescence, on Netflix. Created by Stephen Graham (who also puts in phenomenal work in a feature role) and Jack Thorne, it follows the aftermath of the murder of a thirteen year old girl by a thirteen year old boy, in a working/middle class area of England. It’s an artistic achievement I’ve learned to guard against the hope for when I sit down to watch a television series or movie. To hope for it leaves one disappointed in 99% of what makes it to screens. At the end of the third episode, I was spun, by the skill and vision of being able to evoke what it did with such a simple formula and setup, but also by the profundity of the humanity in the perspective. There are many thousands of other series or films that attempt to address similar subject matter, somewhere between simplistic moralism and saccharine sentiment, masquerading as what Adolescence actually is. At the end of the fourth episode, I was left with a sadness so profound, I sat for about fifteen minutes and cried. The genius of Adolescence is that there are a few simple targets to blame, and it doesn’t avoid making this clear. But blame isn’t a solution to what’s created the situation, the conditions we spend four episodes exploring. In lieu of solutions, it does what few other works like it have the courage to do, refuse to look away from the soul crushing of sadness of what we’re allowing to happen to, allowing to be perpetrated, on our children.

Adolescence is a tragedy, in the proper, traditional sense. It is addressing this question of “What’s going on with our boys and young men?” It is, without doubt, the most truthful and poignant of any attempt to address this that I’ve seen or read. Nothing else I’ve encountered so well encapsulates the weight of that tragedy or so thoroughly touches on so many of it’s dimensions, and looks directly at the destruction of life that is the answer to that question, without letting anyone off the hook, and conveys the scale of what the individual is facing in the social conditions which are part of the answer to it. Social media and digital programming play a part, but they’re also not the whole story. It’s a bigger picture, and it has the wisdom to not reach for simple answers. It also has the wisdom to understand that rage is a response to the profound sadness underneath so much of our current world.

As word about Adolescence quality and power spreads, I’m sure there will be no small number of people who will recoil. “The world is so horrible right now, why would I want to watch something so sad?” I understand this, and had I understood how profoundly affecting it is, I may have avoided it. Yet, I find myself with a sense of real gratitude for its existence and the ability to have seen it.

The truth is, I felt better, lighter, after seeing it. Starting in November, I’ve spent the majority of my time with a baseline anger and anxiety that each new day since January 20th has added to. Starting on January 20, watching clips of Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute at a US presidential inauguration, everyday has been an onslaught of news of a presidential administration whose actions are somehow equal in their stupid absurdity and the ravenousness of their cruelty. I’ve been thinking the anger is a response to the anxiety, as well as the unaccountable lawlessness, and the gleeful, lecherousness tenor of the cruelty in the proclamations of the administration and its surrogates. No human being with a few wrinkles on their brain can deny millions are going to be significantly harmed. In ending USAID, millions are likely to die.

Sitting there on my couch after finishing Adolescence, in a steady stream of tears, I realized something else. The anger has been covering profound sadness. I could say it’s been protecting me from it, but part of what I realized this morning is that shielding and protecting can be, but aren’t always, the same thing. Adolescence sidestepped that shield, and I think the reason I feel better than I have in months, is that in releasing or pulling the shield down from that sadness, it put me back in touch with a part of my humanity that anger requires cutting off. I haven’t been able to look at just how sad this all is. So many of us are going to be put through profound pain and suffering, some in different ways than others, but none of us are going to escape it. It is reasonable, justified and rational to be incandescently angry at the circle of billionaires who helped create this situation, and definitely at the two executing the actions which are hurling us into that pain and suffering. Yet, that other part of myself, from which that sadness emanates, yearns for recognition and expression too.

I understand why there would be some kind of self protection mechanism against this sadness. Like the concept or idea of what art is, what it can do, this sadness is just too big. To try to thoroughly understand even one of its most specific areas, is to court despair. To try to understand it in its fullness is Lovecraftian. Attempting to come to terms with the scale of it is to encounter the fragility of the human psyche. It’s tragedy on a scale so grand, it would drive a person mad if they could be confronted with it. We may take one bite of that sadness at a time, not because it’s an elephant we will be able to devour given sufficient time, but because its existence is an affirmation of our humanity, whether or not we can conceive of its scale. There is truth to the fact that we all die alone, but we do not live alone, and the sadness is a reminder of this. It’s the reminder we feel the anger because there are people who are responsible, broken in ways which make evil banal, now lifted to the highest echelons of power, giving them the opportunity to engage in evil not at all banal. It is also the recognition that the sadness is for the people who are broken in ways which make sadness itself banal. It is because we don’t just recognize each others joy, happiness, warmth, companionship, family, ecstatic experiences of new loves and infatuations, but because we recognize each others pain, suffering, terror and horror. We’re experiencing this non-banal evil, together, and many millions of us are trudging through this sludge of rage, fear and sadness. It’s better we do it together than that we try to prevent it from overcoming us individually.

I’m grateful to be reminded of these things. It clarifies other things too.

Authoritarians want the people in the states they control to be unable to think of much else. They want to be ever present in the lives of the people over whom they rule. It’s why they put up statues of themselves everywhere. We don’t have statues going up everywhere, yet, but we certainly have a kind of myopic tunnel vision. It’s all Trump, all Musk, all the time. This myopia means we are consumed the this anger, and it’s attendant fear. It takes up so much of our time, our mind’s eye, it means not taking much time to consider so much else. The anger towards these usurping interlopers, and the fear of what it means for us, edges out the thoughts of the many millions of others, experiencing the same thing. It causes us to create a veil over the question of what we might do together, that we can’t do alone, and not out of inability or disinterest, but out of the very normal, reasonable, rational response to the inhumanity we’re being confronted with. We focus on the people who are responsible, and though they certainly deserve some focus, it is worth remembering it also serves them if we give them all of our focus.

This isn’t the only kind of myopia fascism is interested in either, is it? One of the reasons authoritarians always target the arts is that they want control of not just what the narrative of current events is, but all narrative. Anything that leads away or points to something outside of the delusional, fabricated versions of history and reality they see as beneficial to their continued rule, is labeled as dangerous and/or degenerate. We can go back a decade, and the movement which has installed fascists in power, is the same movement was then invading spaces dedicated to arts and culture and all discussion about arts and culture, assailing SJWs (social justice warriors), any time a work attempted to take on material or subject matter which strayed from the extremely narrow set of ideas which support fascism. Of course, they put it in terms of “entertainment” versus “messaging/preaching,” because it doesn’t serve their purposes to openly admit the goal is narrow the parameters of acceptable subjects, material and perspectives on those. It’s the evolution of vocabulary, from being dressed up in an artless drag performance of free thinking, yowling at “politically correctness,” to making “woke,” an accusation. Though more and more lately, I associated this use of woke as an accusation or insult with George Carlin’s line, “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

It’s not just art and entertainment either, is it? Musk bought Twitter for exactly this reason. He saw one of the world’s most powerful communication platforms was allowing ideas and narratives counter to his own fascist beliefs to rise to take a prominent place in the cultural consciousness, and so he bought Twitter, re-instated the accounts of the people who’d insure the cost of this was a high as possible, and then insured the service itself, it’s algorithms would preference ideas and discussion favorable to or at least not in conflict with, fascist ideology. One of Musk’s primary interests in buying Twitter was in making the cost of expression related to anything which doesn’t support traditional ideas about gender as high as possible.

Adolescence is deeply interested in this question of gender, of what ideas about masculinity are being transmitted to our boys and young men, and how this effects women. It’s on a platform, Netflix, which the majority of culture watchers (myself included) have serious questions about related to the way its influence over the landscape of cinematic arts is shaping the audience relationship to them. Somehow, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne convinced this corporate behemoth, most responsible for creative industries near total faith the algorithmic perspective on the arts, to give a platform to this difficult, challenging piece of exploratory art that speaks to one of the most pernicious questions of our time with a deep sense of humanity.

The only thing it treats as purely villainous is the phenomenon of the “manosphere” influencer, whose proximity to the characters is simultaneously one of oblique distance and intimate infiltration of the sanctity of home and family. Adolescence treats human interaction and human motive as the complicated thing it most often is, a truth fascism denies in order to obscure that it’s an ideology obsessed with the accumulation of power, which is proven and expressed through punishment and it’s twin, persecution, which become indistinguishable over time. There are no monsters in the English town where the Adolescence is set, just people ricocheting off of each other as they stumble, struggle, and cut each other with the jagged edges of their varying degrees of brokenness, and an industry that exists to prey on that brokenness, that then helps to entrench this brokenness in a new generation, and peels off the protections their elders have used in trying to keep from cutting others. If all that weren’t enough, it also looks directly at the degree to which this is a brokenness passed on from one generation to the next, despite the older generations best efforts (and what genuine successes they have achieved) in trying to do better than their parents.

Adolescence ends up being a rich work, full of nuance and complexity, using both stark and subtle shades, colors and tones. It stands, in direct contradiction to the fascist narrative on the same subject, because the fascist mind can only produce the equivalent of an unshaded charcoal line drawing. The imaginative capacity of the fascist mind can only produce  solid, hard lines in the starkest terms. There are the lines alone, and empty space between them. Works like Adolescence are full of shading, tones, the warmest and coldest hues of color. There are some hard lines, but the space between them is full of what results from the exploration of curiosity, as opposed to the stark contrasts of certainty in ignorance. Whether that ignorance is willful, another shield from anxious fears, or learned as culturally indoctrinated certainty, in it’s paucity of curiosity and imagination (you can’t have one without the other), it is the same.

The thing is, by their nature of being human expression, the arts are anarchic. They are exploratory, explanatory, exculpatory, escapist, and hundreds of other things. There is even fascist art. Like the rest, it’s impossible to stop its creation. The best that can be done is to identify it for what it is when we encounter it. Fascist art alone isn’t much threat though either. Overwhelmingly, it has about as much impact and substance as television commercials, though like commercials, occasionally it strikes some chord or tone which makes it memorable. It is, by design, empty of substance, which is why fascist authoritarians try to control the landscape and environment to preclude anything but fascist art. Once it has to attempt to stand next to the rest of what we create, its emptiness is impossible to miss.

The anarchic nature of art means is it so many things, no matter what language, no matter what era in time, individually, we can’t describe it in its fullness. We recognize it. We know what it is, but it’s only because we are cobbling together this understanding from many different attempts, and the many perspectives which have tried to describe it, to say what it is, what makes it that. We fail individually, but succeed as a whole. We have created all of the things it is, because for one reason or another we need them.

All of this, and the millions more words I could write about this, is to say we must continue to create, discuss and celebrate art, even as we are in a fascist era. Especially because we are in a fascist era. By it’s essential anarchic nature, art is a reminder that the delusional order fascists try to impose is just that, delusional. The fascist looks on the absolute reality of humanity, the sprawling, chaotic, vibrant, pulsing mass that is human life and is horrified to a depth they want to destroy it, and they do so, by creating a weaponized unreality, a reality that is in itself, not a sojourn or exploration, but a prison. It accepts no question, only declaration in keeping with it’s delusions. In their zeal for this, fascists promise the fearful and ignorant (and these are inextricable as well) they can grip the arts, the world really, tightly enough to impose the delusion fascism claims is control. What they can’t control, they try to discredit as frivolous, naive and childish. Anything outside of this weaponized unreality is a threat.

To accept that the arts, even when if are conceived as entertainment, are nothing but frivolous, nothing but escape, is to accept the fascist perspective toward all expression. It is to believe, as an individual, one can conceive of the entire scope of motives for creation, the entire circumstances and perspectives of the audiences and how each might receive them, what they might take from them, what they might gain or lose from them. It is to appoint ones self a kind of petty dictator, attempting to enforce definition and meaning over one’s limited scope of influence. When enough people believe this, they appoint the petty dictator who tells them he shares their vision of what is frivolous, what is dangerous, degenerate, and what isn’t. And yes, it is just about always a he.

So… keep making things. Keep talking about the things you make. Keep talking about the things other people make, that bring you joy or happiness, that make you think or feel. Whatever you do, do not let fascists, whether grand and official or unofficial and petite, tell you that the arts, the celebration of them, the discussion of them, the presentation of them, is not by it’s very nature, oppositional to fascism. And on those occasions you come across fascist art, those dimwitted commercials for fear and ignorance, belittle them. Laugh at them. Treat them as being as small as those who created them. Because at the end of the day, that is what fascism is, what it wants to try to convince us, that we are, and we have to be small. We keep practicing art, we keep reveling in it, we keep celebrating it, lambasting it, discussing it, exactly because neither we nor it are small. We practice it, we venerate it, we discuss it, we engage with it because it is the real magic that the concept of alchemy suggests, and that is beyond the fascist imagination, which is why they think AI can make art, and is why its more important than ever not to accept what the fascist perspective says art is or can be.