Lessons from a Rhetorical Car Fire

Four take-aways from the man who promises to do for arts management what the Wuhan Institute of Virology did for Chinese tourism.

I sometimes read Alan Harrison for the same reason I sometimes slow down to gander at a car accident. I can’t contribute any help to the situation and it’s best for everyone if I keep moving, but it’s hard to deny the spectacle, particularly if fire trucks are involved.

So it is with the Subaru flambée that is Your Addiction to Artistic Vision Means Diddly-Squat to Your Community. It’s so poorly argued and poorly written that I feel some pity for the mental state of the author.¹ He may in fact be courting legal trouble, in that he hires himself out as a nonprofit consultant, and his advice runs so contrary to good sense and real-world 501(c)(3) management that one could imagine a malpractice suit emerging from it.

Also, I’ve met some junk-tier progressives, but putting images of Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Vladimir Putin, and Geert Wilders on a graphic labeled “THE NEW AXIS POWERS?”, while he attributes “the implosion of our current political system and ceding democracy for authoritarianism” to a kind of epistemic addiction, is not the most formidable display of self-awareness I’ve ever seen.

Not my problem, and perhaps in person he has a more professional mien, but look, fire trucks!

At one time I would have criticized this point by point, but now I have my own cultural organization. I have much to learn, and here’s what I learn from Alan Harrison, based on the assumption that everything he wrote at the link above is not just wrong, but that the opposite of each claim therein is true.

Vision is everything. Dissident Muse fosters opportunities for creation, publication, exhibition, and education by and for people who love beauty and freedom. I’ve been tweaking that description since last year because it helps me decide what I’m supposed to do with my day. The days add up. They also run out. Perhaps here and there is some Cecil B. Demented type, rolling off the rooftop in a wheelchair, set ablaze, yelling “I have a vision!” as he takes out a cop.² A more typical example of artistic determination is to have a fair idea where you’re headed and a less-than-fair idea of how to get there except to grind. One might as well grind in the right direction.

Art is enough. Art is noble. My art may not be noble, but the goal to put something with artistic quality in the world is a worthy end in itself. If you want to right civilization in some way, lovely. But first, the only political art that doesn’t lapse into mere propaganda draws from the ineffably deep well of common humanity. Second, usually there are more direct means available, exercised by specialists in those means. Join them and support them if you’re inclined. But do it because you as an artist believe in what they’re doing, not because you as an artist don’t believe in what you’re doing.

Throw the better party and invite everyone. My judgment about the specimens of the Monoculture is clear and public. But in the words of The Grouch, “I'm a humanoid, too / And if you're cool with me, then I'll look past the void in you / Instead of through.” Nobody has to vote like me or think like me or believe the same things as me to collaborate with me. If someone doesn’t reciprocate, cool. There are a lot of people in the world. I stand by my perspective but I don’t mistake it for God’s. Meanwhile, you can either form community around good art and good thinking about art, or you can get down with the Monoculture as it tries to turn the arts into a secular version of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, full of prissy do-gooders, with diversity, equity, and inclusion—all so-called—plugged into the hole where a schoolmarmish faith in Jesus used to reside.

Exert metacognition. Understand the best arguments against your position and deal with them as if you, or even better, someone a little smarter and a with a little more integrity than you, was forming them. Ask yourself continually how you know what you know. Assume that you are doing an enormous number on yourself. Suspect that you may be wrong, but don’t just stop there—proceed to wonder how.

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I often get the sense that we are in the midst of some kind of grand contraction of possibility. Seventy years ago, it was a viable career strategy for a talented painter to rent a studio on Tenth Street in Manhattan and wait for a critic to drop by. Do that now and you’ll be waiting until the end of time, in a space that will set you back $2700 a month instead of $27. No doubt both artists and arts professionals are under unprecedented pressures, at once economic, political, and philosophical. The atmosphere is has a faint scent of apocalypse on it, and commensurately, would-be saviors have popped up in the marketplace to goad you down their particular path of salvation—promising damnation if you hesitate. Many have books for sale. We will be seeing more of such figures.

But this strikes me as a time to reconsider durable principles and commit to them in a sensible manner that accounts for contemporary circumstances. To be brave but not too certain, to be inventive but not to disdain the tradition, to address the moment but also do right by eternity.

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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in. For future titles, see the ASBC schedule.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon or B&N.

1. Don’t leave any comments at Harrison’s post. He will likely remove them.

2. Reference at 1:21 mark in this amazing film.