Artistic creation: a product of freedom or tyranny?
Author James Jackson writes a guest essay in response to one of our Battle of Ideas festival panels on censorship and boycotts in the arts.
Boycotting as a political strategy is fashionable again, and this time round the arts are centre stage. This year, a slew of campaigns supported by authors, musicians and artists have targeted festivals, galleries and theatres. Bands Boycott Barclays encouraged a third of performers to quit Brighton’s Great Escape festival while Fossil Free Books organised author boycotts of the Hay Literary Festival to oust investment-management firm Baillie Gifford. The ramifications – including financial costs to organisers and artists – have been significant. Both these high-profile sponsors subsequently suspended support for festivals and others are considering their future involvement.
Are boycotts best understood as artists and audiences exercising a freedom to act politically, or actions that undermine artistic freedom? Do boycotts amount to simply another form of virtue-signalling, or an admirable way of standing up for one’s beliefs? Why do those artists and festival organisers with little sympathy with campaigners’ causes seem unable to stand up for artistic freedom? Can artistic freedom survive an era of cultural boycotts?
These are some of the questions we asked during our discussion at the Battle of Ideas festival: Are cultural boycotts killing artistic freedom? Author and arts commentator James Jackson was in the audience, and has written the following guest Substack for the Academy of Ideas on his reflections on the discussion.
Artistic creation: a product of freedom or tyranny?
By James Jackson
At this year’s Battle of Ideas festival, I attended a very stimulating and thought-provoking panel discussion on artistic freedom and censorship in the arts. The general feeling from the panel – and the room as a whole – was that our cultural institutions have turned what should be arenas of creativity into environments of ideological homogeneity and banal conformity.
We heard stories of various arts and cultural institutions (both publicly and privately funded) who have either censored dissenting artists or imposed a series of philistine ‘values’ (often relating to DEI, social justice, sustainability and climate change, gender ideology, etc) on creative minds. There was much discussion about the stifling of free thought and straitjacketing of those independent minds who wish to pursue daring projects that go against the grain.
All of this is concerning, but there was a salient point made by the comedian Simon Evans (who was in the audience) about the fact that this urge to censor, and to curtail artistic freedom, is a recurring phenomenon, and is something artists of every generation have to contend with in one form or another.
In our own age, it is the proponents of critical social-justice ideology whose philistine, sanctimonious and absurd egalitarian beliefs have swept our institutions. Arts Council England’s 2020-2030 strategy includes such predictably banal aims as ensuring that ‘equality and diversity are embedded in all of our policies, programmes and funding opportunities’ and that equality and diversity ‘should underpin all of our decision making’. The Globe Theatre, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, announced that 'we are committed to becoming an anti-racist and pro-equality organisation'. The ideological capture of this institution was summed up perfectly in the words of Professor Farah Karim-Cooper, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe:
At Shakespeare’s Globe, we take our cause seriously – Shakespeare for all. It is not virtue signalling, nor is it about Shakespeare’s ‘universality’. Shakespeare has for centuries been performed, studied and read primarily through the lens of white excellence. As the custodians of Shakespeare’s most iconic theatres, we have a responsibility to talk honestly about the period from which he emerged and challenge the racist structures that remain by providing greater access to the works and demonstrating how Shakespeare speaks powerfully to our moment.
This rather smug and supercilious passage encapsulates the dire truth that cultural institutions that were set up to pass on our great inheritance are in fact run by people who have nothing but contempt for culture and the arts, and seem to use their position as an opportunity to advance their own political causes. When genuine lovers of the Bard are guilt-tripped into thinking that appreciation and cultivation amount to ‘white excellence’ rather than just ‘excellence’, or it is treated as objective fact that ‘racist structures’ permeate the institution, we know that these places have been hollowed out and have moved away from their original mission. This philistine and self-righteous hectoring is symptomatic of their stagnation and is testament to an age where identity politics and a desire for victimhood has replaced the idea that we ought to celebrate great artists, writers and figures from the past.
One of the reasons for our current malaise, as postulated by another member of the audience at the panel discussion, is the insistence that cultural institutions must have a set of ‘values’ from the outset. Values, the questioner argued, are often vague, subjective and open to abuse, and the problem is exacerbated by virtue of the fact that we attempt to establish a hierarchy of values in the first place. While I agree with the first point, the problem with the latter is that it does not take account of the fact that artistic freedom is itself a value and needs to be argued for rather than be treated as something that just exists. And if we do value artistic freedom, then we must accept that there is a value more desirable, more important and even superior to the view that artists ought to toe the line and subordinate themselves to an Elect who hold the ‘correct’ views.
But while we may talk about the desirability of artistic freedom, it is also worth asking some difficult questions about the nature of artistic production more generally and the reality that great art does not always arise from an atmosphere of freedom. John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, made a convincing case for freedom as a pre-requisite for nurturing geniuses of all kinds:
[G]enius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people – less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number if moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.
Conversely, great art can emerge from a milieu of fear, tyranny and oppression. It might be that government overreach, bureaucratic entities or authoritarian regimes who suppress individual creativity might in fact propel (or stimulate) great artists to exercise their creative muscles in a way they may not have done in an atmosphere of unfettered freedom. An atmosphere of censorship or bureaucratic overreach can (inadvertently) produce, or bring to light, geniuses – one thinks of Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union or Molière at the court of Louis XIV.
There is a sense, in both Mill’s advocacy for freedom and the argument that tyranny stimulates creativity, that the genius – artistic or otherwise – is someone who occupies a realm outside of his own time, who somehow transcends the constraints placed upon him or her by the social order, political structure or permeant zeitgeist. This is a view that runs against belief held by many ideologues in universities and other cultural institutions, who argue that geniuses are merely social fictions and canons are mere arbitrary lists of authors and artists who have been selected by the ruling class of critics, intellectuals who wish to use the canon to intensify their power. Such a view is overly simplistic, not least because their understanding of what constitutes power and who exercises it is far more complex than the narrow categories of identity they often point to as the oppressed and oppressors in this system.
To use the example of Molière: at the end of his wonderfully comical Tartuffe, the imposter (and hypocrite) who has deceived those around him throughout the play is exposed by none other than the King. There is no doubt that this ending was included to please the sensibility of Louis XIV. But in spite of the King’s favourable response, the play was sharply criticised by a number of powerful factions, including the Catholic church, who thought the main character’s use of piety to manipulate and deceive others was downright offensive. These factions did not care about Molière’s genius as much as the ‘message’ the play was trying to send.
Despite the best efforts of these factions to suppress the play, Tartuffe has long outlived that world and to this day is celebrated as a classic of French literature, which in itself is testament to Molière’s genius. Molière is often included in French curricula, and the French language is known as ‘la langue de Molière’ (‘the language of Molière’). In the famous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns) of the seventeenth century, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux predicted that Molière (along with Racine and Corneille) would be remembered by posterity – as the great works of the ancient world had been – and not just products of the age of Louis XIV.
Artistic geniuses may be raised up by patrons – the state, the aristocracy, the Church – but in the instance of a movement such as Romanticism, it was the individual who could flourish according to his own talents that mattered. Artistic greatness is notoriously difficult to predict, and although it may be hard-wired to a certain extent, environmental pressures undoubtedly play a role in bringing this out, or of stimulating him further if such pressures work to suppress their genius. John Milton’s Areopagitica – a defence of freedom of speech against licensing – has itself become a work of genius, one stimulated by the threat of censorship.
The urge to suppress artists and writers arguably stems from a concern that the arts have the power to corrupt and influence. A desire to instrumentalise the arts, to insist that it must have social and political utility, and that it must align with a set of pre-ordained values, is the alternative to censorship. This can lead to all sorts of art – some without any aesthetic or cognitive value – being promoted simply on the grounds that they convey the ‘right’ message. It also demonstrates contempt for art itself: that the arts are a threat to those in power and are only acceptable if they are aligned with their ideology. There is an underlying assumption here, as well, that art has the power to shape our thoughts and actions. While the arts may shape us in some ways, they may do very little when it comes to shaping our behaviour and actions.
The sobering remarks of great Jewish intellectual, George Steiner, that ‘we know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning’, tell us that art and culture may not be as close to civilised society as we might hope. The same might be said of some of the great artists and geniuses. Camille Paglia observed that they often tend to be obsessive and occupy a place outside of civilised society. She argues specifically that men have a greater tendency towards this behaviour. One of her most infamous statements is that ‘there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper’. Caravaggio was a great artist as well as a murderer. A genius can be as destructive as he can be creative. Blaise Pascal remarked that: ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ We might also say that a great many of humanity’s achievements have stemmed from the same problem as well.
Van Gogh, who suffered from depression and lived a life of solitude, transferred his pain and suffering into great art. Édith Piaf’s Hymne à l’amour, written as a tribute to her lover who died in a plane crash, turns her pain into a beauty that would be appreciated by millions. Whether it is a personal suffering or the suffering at the hands of an authoritarian, autocratic of tyrannical regime, if one does not suffer for one’s art, is the end result more often banal than profound?
In an atmosphere of freedom, there is a sense that power of art is lost because there is little at stake and ‘anything goes’, resulting in a kind of vacuous culture that is trivial and inconsequential. I recently rewatched a stimulating debate on this subject from the 1980s between George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky and Mary McCarthy. Steiner remarked with a degree of jaded despair that ‘during a showing on American television of the Holocaust, advertisements interrupted the actual film at regular (very brief) intervals – they included advertisements for pantyhose and detergents shown between scenes of torture and suffocation in the gas ovens’.
This crude example of unintended bathos, where we move from images of a tragedy that is difficult to put into words to something so very trivial, is symptomatic of a society that seems to have forgotten what tragedy is and is devoid of meaning. So much of contemporary art and consumer culture is the end result of this. Tracey Emin’s Unmade Bed epitomises a breakdown of the artist’s relationship to beauty, truth and goodness, and of art’s redemptive qualities.
The counter argument of that debate, put by Brodsky and McCarthy, is that an environment like the Soviet Union was equally capable of producing trash, or ephemera that would not stand the test of time. Even if authoritarian conditions may stimulate what is best in an artist, it can inspire a great many mediocre artists to produce something that stands in accordance with the very worst aspects of that society. It is not, therefore, the conditions of the environment that matter, but how the artist is stimulated according to the conditions in which he finds himself.
There is a great deal of literature, art and culture that is absorbed completely in the time of its own creation. Great art, timeless art, often tells us that there is something greater than ourselves and that there exists an ongoing conversation through time, from generation to generation, between past, present and future.
No political regime or bureaucratic entity is ultimately the producer of great art – it is, ultimately, great individuals. Great art is the product not only of skill and imagination, but often courage and bravery, while a great artist is one who can step outside of the age in which he or she works and be stimulated by a world of imagination that looks beyond the present zeitgeist. Pressures of censorship and curtailment of freedom permeate every age (in one form or another).
It is incumbent on artists, writers or creatives of any kind to recognise these pressures and aim (regardless of how difficult it may be) to express his or her vision as honestly as he or she can. Genuine progress depends upon dissent, and great art is part of that story. A civilisation that hopes to flourish must be open to the possibility of cultivating genius and must resist the urge to censor. But if they do resort to censorship, I am confident that those with creative minds, and with vast imagination, will prevail, as those throughout the centuries have done.
Power is transient; great art is immortal.
James Jackson is the author of The Poetic Idioms of Jean Cocteau’s Art: Paths to Immortality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and is currently writing a book on performances, translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s Richard II across nations and epochs. He has written for Quillette and has his own Substack, where he writes about culture, politics and the arts.
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