After the recent CNN/YouTube debate — which featured Democratic presidential candidates answering questions from a snowman and critiquing each other's wardrobes — a chorus of critics once again lamented the creeping influence of entertainment in politics. The problem has been the subject of ample analysis in recent months, but amid our collective hand-wringing we have ignored a more pernicious problem: the creeping influence of politics on the arts and entertainment.
Partisan brawls, once confined to oped pages and political talk shows, now regularly spill into art galleries, amphitheaters and multiplexes. Examples abound, from the public feud in country music between the Bush-bashing Dixie Chicks and the Bush-backing Toby Keith to the proliferation of political art exhibits and the spate of thinly veiled political allegories released by Hollywood filmmakers in recent years.
Rockers now launch concert tours to promote presidential candidates while independent film festivals such as Sundance open with fiery partisan speeches and showcase advocacy films pushing one hot-button issue after another. Even comic strip authors have hopped on the activist bandwagon. A recent weekend's comics featured politically charged critiques of everything from environmental activism and wartime journalism to political fundraising and critics of a former Supreme Court justice.
There is nothing new about political messages infiltrating the arts and entertainment. For decades now, artists and critics have tended to equate a politicized social conscience with artistic seriousness. What is striking about today's politically charged movies, music lyrics and art exhibits is how commonplace they have become — and how pointedly partisan.
Artists and entertainers no longer simply endorse candidates or champion political causes in their free time. They write songs that bash specific politicians, draft scripts to advance particular policies and proudly characterize their art as a tool of political persuasion. After a relative lull since the 1960s, the ranks of these entertainer-activists have exploded in recent years.
Conservatives often bemoan the fact that so many of them lean left in their political views. But the problem runs deeper than political imbalance. Our nation's fierce partisan divide is poisoning one of the few realms of culture that can help us bridge that divide: the world of art and entertainment.
In today's polarized climate, artists and entertainers can provide a reprieve from partisan bickering and our scandal-driven, 24-hour news cycle. Authentic art transcends politics not through escapism or sensationalism, but by inviting us to suspend our preconceptions, enter into the experience of another and consider universal themes from new perspectives.
Our superficial political culture discourages us from grappling with the fundamental value conflicts at the root of our policy disputes. But art illuminates the competing worldviews that drive these debates and opens an avenue for genuine dialogue. Through story, song and sheer, transcendent beauty, art expands our horizons and pushes us to look beyond mere political solutions for answers to our deepest longings and most pressing problems. An artist's transcendent vision reminds us that profound meaning lurks just beneath the surface of ordinary life — and far from the noise of horse-race politics and partisan feuds.
Author Thomas Merton once said that artists, like saints, are "in the world and not of it. . . . The integrity of an artist," he said, "lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it."
Like prophets who have lost their voice, today's politicized artists and entertainers echo the slogans of our fight-club political culture but fail to rise above our claustrophobic political categories. In their desperation to be politically relevant, they implicitly affirm the one lie against which great artists always have rebelled: that art is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.
