Spencer Klavan vs Conservative Art™

Why does every piece of "Conservative art" inevitably turn out to be cringe-inducing pabulum or hamfisted kitsch?

Spencer Klavan, son of best selling author Andrew Klavan, takes a crack at the answer and suggests some solutions.

Screencap: Daily Wire

For as long as I’ve been alive and longer, the Right has had a culture problem. I can’t remember a time when conservative journals didn’t occasionally publish essays urging movement stalwarts to divert just a bit of their focus away from policy activism and toward stylish artistic ventures. But it seems like this is always a losing battle. Occasionally a top-tier show or movie like John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place will flash a couple tantalizing moments of family prayer across the screen. Then the members of a huge, beleaguered, and chronically underserved audience demographic—normal people—jump up eagerly like broken-spirited abuse victims in hopes that “the tide is turning.” It is not.

The gentle haze of default social progressivism continues wafting unbroken in the background of most big-ticket pop art. For every Chris Pratt sermon at the MTV awards, ten more nature documentaries about gay flamingoes are greenlit. There are various reasons why the silent majority continues to sit and take this in its charmingly but unproductively silent way.

Related: Conservative Creatives

For one thing, there’s a general skittishness among donors about funding inherently unruly ventures like art: conservative investors recoil, writes Michael Anton, from “spending money in ways and on things that everyone else hasn’t been funding for the last fifty years.” And there’s of course an entire network of industrial-strength machinery grinding in exactly the opposite direction—well-established backers and iconic studio brands pumping out one Star Wars girlboss after another cartoon about climate change. Derivative though these products may be, you’re not going to compete with them.

But that raises an uncomfortable question: why not? Why do skilled artists keep making, and the general public keep consuming, works of culture both high and low that communicate a bottomless contempt for the religious practices, national ideals, and sexual mores that built the country? The highest-grossing movie in America last year culminated in a dog’s breakfast of warmed-over, second-wave feminist sloganeering that would have sounded tired coming from the mouth of Gloria Steinem in 1968. The woman who wrote it will now be directing The Chronicles of Narnia for Netflix.

This is a delicate subject. De gustibus non est disputandum is a principle as old as the hills, and though it’s well translated as “there’s no accounting for taste,” it also carries the hint that “there’s no arguing about taste.” The implication is less that there’s no such thing as right or wrong in matters of taste, and more that trying to prove yourself right and the other guy wrong is unlikely to get you far or make you many friends. “To each his yum, and let no man yuck it” would be a decent modern update, striking an appropriately defensive note.

And God knows conservatives of every persuasion have suffered more than enough abusive caricature for their supposedly boorish, unrefined sensibilities. You don’t have to subject yourself to NPR to experience this snobbery: the call is also coming from inside the house. Just mill about Dimes Square, if that reference isn’t already hopelessly outré, and note the exasperation with which the dandies of the “dissident Right” describe their fellow travelers from the Shire. Meanwhile, those beloved of the reigning uniculture get away with all manner of crimes against fashion. Just look, I implore you, at what they’ve done to the gay flag.

It would be needlessly cruel to multiply examples. But all conservatives in the arts know that a major sector of the audience they’re trying to reach will go in for the most appalling kitsch if it’s slathered in red, white, and blue. Without disdaining them for this, it’s important we be honest that they are wrong about the quality of such products as Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” or Natasha Owens’s “The Chosen One.” Wrong not in a moral or spiritual sense, perhaps, but in the sense that aesthetic quality is not arbitrary, and not everyone’s judgment is as good as everyone else’s.

That audience sector has a name, and its name is Boomers.

Related: Conservative NPCs

We have to be able to admit this and talk about it—because it’s true, because denying it creates perverse incentives, and because no really healthy artistic culture can flourish without a discerning public or a patronage class with taste. If you want donors to fund enterprises that will create, publicize, and reward achievement in the arts, you need people who know what that is.

There it is: Patronage.

You may have noticed from his use of shopworn phrases like "silent majority" that Klavan thinks we're still living in 1996.

But his allusion to the lack of a discerning public rings true. Because there no longer is an "American public." Instead, we're inmates in an open-air version of the prison fom The Dark Knight Rises.

Screencap: Warner Bros.

Klavan's other mistake is, as usual, a priori accepting the enemy's frame—this time, regarding criteria for judging good art, which are not reducible to mere matters of subjective taste.

It shouldn't be controversial for Conservatives to affirm that artistic standards are objective. After all, that's what art is: work performed to a standard.

Once you understand the problem, the solution presents itself.

Ancient Egypt had the longest-lasting civilization on record, in part because their rulers knew the value of art and enforced correspondingly strict guidelines on artists. Western art attained its greatest heights under the patronage of Christian princes and the Church herself. What's needed now is a new class of patrons who acknowledge Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. And they need to bring their resources to bear reviving the arts.

Related: "Hollywood Is in Shambles"

But “to each his own” is not really a very conservative principle. It’s the post-modernists who use the variety of human interests as license to infer that no one can possibly judge between Duruflé’s “Ubi Caritas” and Cardi B’s “Bongos.” More traditionally-minded folks know, or ought to know, that beauty is a thing that exists, like light, and that we have faculties for perceiving both. As the eyes see brightness, so taste registers excellence in matters literary, musical, and figurative.

Conservatives are in friendly territory here, though it may not feel that way. The best starter pack for thinking about taste is an essay by none other than Edmund Burke, who makes a useful distinction between learning to see distinctly what something is (a faculty of perception) and evaluating whether it’s any good at being that thing (a faculty of judgment). It’s important that they go in that order. Before you even think about judgment you have to perceive what an artist is doing or trying to do—then you can decide whether he succeeds at doing it and, for that matter, whether it’s a good thing to do in the first place.

He almost had it that time. But instead of just admitting "Beauty is objective because it's a transcendental property founded in God," Klavan retreats into a cloud of Burkean squid ink. He has to, because Conservatism is just a form of retrograde Liberalism. And the core tenet of Liberalism is "To each his own."

Seeing these Conservative intellectuals flailing around like robots caught in a logic loop never gets old.

There is one area, though, where the Right exhibits pretty good taste, and that’s online. It’s well known at this point that the world of young dissidents is a carnival of memery, renegade publishing, and tech-enabled artistic experimentation. Like most artists, the impish Bohemians of what was once called the New Right are more instinctively creative than they are philosophically rigorous. Some of them have ventured into intellectual territory that is genuinely sinister or simply fruitless. This has caused some justified concern among elder statesmen, who have seen bad ideas come and go and know a dead end when they see one.

But the meeting between established conservative worthies and chic young guns has also been hampered by an unwillingness on the worthies’ part to let artists be artists. Why there is not already a Peachy Keenan sitcom in production, for instance, is beyond me, but I suspect it’s once again a matter of taste. We want Conservative Art™, not art by conservatives. We want morality tales in recognizable and safe formats that lead us to exactly the conclusions we already held. And no swearing, please.

Look, the reason why Conservative billionaires aren't giving money to artrists who don't hate them is simple.

An institution is what it does. If Con Inc. considered funding indie film makers, newpub authors, and anti-Woke YouTubers its job, they would have done it by now.

Instead, they pay guys like Klavan to write long-winded essays about why the guys who fund him should back indie creators instead.

Now ask yourself: If anyone with any say in the matter was expected to take these kinds of articles seriously, would they ever get written?

The question asnswers itself.

Related: If Conservatives Fought

It has felt for a while as if everyone I meet has a screenplay, or an idea for a new media organization, or a novel they want to get published. Many of these ventures are perfectly worth pursuing; many of them are run by friends of mine and have achieved considerable success. But I’m not sure that more of them is what’s most desperately needed on the Right.

Instead, the Right awaits its Cardinal Borghese: someone who not only wants to fill his villa with sculptures, but knows how to pick a real corker. You don’t get a Bernini without a Borghese, and you don’t get a Borghese without a society that trains its best and brightest to tell good art from bad. Our universities sure won’t do it, so we’ll have to do it ourselves—in families, in local associations, and in those schools we staff with our best scholars. Some of us need to be making art, that’s true. But far more of us need to be learning how to appreciate art, both for its own sake and because it will make us more effective operators in the media world. You can’t spell counter-culture without culture.

Klavan may not recognize the full implications of his conslusion. Or he knows his bosses won't take them seriously. But even if it's for the wrong reasons, he's right.

The solutions the Right needs to save the arts from Conservative Art™ are:

1. A confessional integralist state

2. Neopatronage

And as Providence would have it, we're getting both.

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