I've made comments similar to Barry's on my blog. While I think art is fundamentally non-political, art also subsumes everything that's important to both artists and audiences-- and that includes politics. My general feeling is that I'm not opposed to seeing an artist represent a POV alien to my own, as long as he does a reasonably good job setting forth his principles. The death of political discourse in art comes about whenever artists surrender to the temptation not to argue, but to preach.
To which the blog-meister KID respondcd:
Well observed comment, GP, but do you think it's possible that 'preaching' is sometimes the best way to kick-start discussion on both sides of the 'argument'? Hopefully Barry will contribute his observations.
My short answer is that I don't think that the strategy of preaching usually sparks greater discussion. Preaching is the purest form of rhetoric, in which the speaker starts from the assumption that he's tapped into some unassailable position, and everything he says from thereon is just support for that position. One can argue against a preacher, and maybe even refine one's own position better, but you can't really get the preacher to concede any important ground. That's why I don't consider (for example) Steve Ditko to fit this paradigm. He takes a position and can't be swayed from it, like the preacher-type. Nevertheless, Ditko presents arguments, not preachments. Some of his arguments are strong and some are weak, but there's a quality of rational debate in his work that makes me esteem it, even if I would never validate Ditko's beliefs.
My counter-example is not an exact parallel to Ditko, since my selection is not an artist. Still, since I'd briefly discussed Frederic Wertham with Kid in an earlier post, I feel like using the famed anti-comics activist as my example of the preacher-type. Once Wertham formulated his negative judgment of American comics, he stuck to that judgment for the most part. (One of the doctor's last books, which I've not read, makes more or less benign comments about comics-fandom, though I'm told that Wertham never precisely reverses any of his positions from SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT.) Wertham's method, though, is not rational discourse, like Ditko's. The first chapter of SEDUCTION provides Wertham's entire rationale-- children are like garden-plants, and must not be exposed to insidious influences-- is set forth. From then on, Wertham is just like an old-time preacher, castigating the comics-industry with examples of its many sins-- racism, sexism, commodification of violence (i.e., ads for "Daisy rifles" and so on). Even back in 1954, one had to expect that the good doctor was loading the dice in his own favor, though not until 2013 did Carol Tilley examine Wertham's records in detail, proving, as Bleeding Cool put it, "Frederic Wertham Lied and Lied and Lied About Comics."
Yet, even if Wertham's supporting evidence had been without blemish, his approach would still have been that of a preacher. I don't believe that he sparked any deep discussions regarding American pop culture in his own time. Naturally, once the effects of his work became part of history, his preachments became a bellwether for later arguments, both pro-Wertham (Bart Beaty, critiqued by me here) and anti-Wertham (David Hadju's THE TEN CENT PLAGUE).
In general, preachers only prosper when they tap into some societal concern greater than their preachments. Wertham wasn't by any means the first person to critique American comics, and not a few later writers have blamed his success on the American public's desire to find some scapegoat for perceived troubles, like "juvenile delinquency." Still, it's significant that not every aspect of the psychiatrist's fanaticism was shared by that public. For instance, the doctor hated the very Comics Code he helped spawn because he thought that the Code still allowed children access to "crime comics," even in a purportedly tamer form. Wertham, in a sort of wacky foretaste of the 1967 Motion Picture ratings code, wanted all comics to be off limits to children under fifteen-- which, of course, would have killed American comic books in the medium's comparative infancy. No adults of the 1950s would have been caught dead reading comic books, and adolescents in their late teens typically gravitated away from comics in that period, as they began using their surplus money for dating and other pursuits. To the best of my knowledge, none of Wertham's allies shared his vision of an utterly squeaky-clean magazine-rack, and even the Senate Committee that investigated the medium in 1954 only issued stern warnings to the comics industry, rather than taking any of the actions Wertham advocated.
Wertham's negative example as a "preacher-type" doesn't necessarily mean that no one at any time has ever used the preaching-technique for generally beneficent purposes-- though the definition of goodness may depend, as the saying goes, on "whose ox is gored." But Wertham is nevertheless a key example of an individual using the technique of preaching to quell, rather than encourage, discussion.
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