Conservatives should reinvest in art for its own sake, not to win a culture war
via: The American Conservative Magazine
Calling on conservatives to write fiction in order to regain power by shaping the moral imagination, as Bellow seems to claim, would, in my view, repeat the errors of the later avant-garde and progressives who came to view art as a weapon in class struggle. This attitude toward art always leads to art becoming a mere tool, a mere means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Bellow tries to distinguish between the “the original counterculture” and a counterculture that “was hijacked and turned into a vehicle for progressive politics,” but I don’t buy this.
The problem with Bellow’s approach,
as Rod remarked two weeks ago, is that it would most likely lead to ideologically “pure” but bad work:
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/prufrock/politics-and-literature/
