RWAQ
some notes on the 'right wing art question'
My first aim in life was to be a novelist. Like DFW, Proust. Dos Passos. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. I would write a novel and become acclaimed. I would get a MacArthur Genius Grant. I would live and die in Paris, with supermodels on a leash. I would rest in Pere Lachaise.
Such was not to be. I wrote at least two novels and one screenplay. And I tried to submit them to agents and publishing houses.
Perhaps they weren’t good. But they were certainly good enough to attract attention and invite an introduction to an editor or a note of encouragement. Instead just boilerplate rejection letters - if anything at all.
I’m not alone in this. It was humiliation and a defeat. It was demoralizing. It was years ago.
I’ve adapted. I went to twitter. I went to 4chan. I have a substack. I have recently become a bookmaker. Perhaps I have a book or three left in me yet. The age of AI has opened doors as well.
Plenty of grist has been made on this point. The ‘Right Wing Art Question’ (henceforth RWAQ - ‘arr-whack’) is a cyclical twitter topic; like seasonal flus. Or like the media literacy required to appreciate starship troopers.
To wit: ‘right wing art’ is a retarded concept. The ‘right wing art question’ is a more interesting topic because it invites us into the depths of something.
There are several angles to this. The first is quantifying whether there is truth in the fact that certain groups have been denied equal access to opportunity. There have been several great articles on this topic; one viral article on Tablet Magazine made the rounds two months ago. I will not rehash this. Some of it is hard to find because twitter search is dreadful; and google search is increasingly a swamp.
The second is whether ‘art can be right wing.’ The short answer, in my opinion, is no. I’d say the difference between ‘art’ and ‘hackwork’ was perfectly defined long ago by Karl Marx. You see, John Milton wrote Paradise Lost as a silkworm weaves silk. A journalist hack writes articles for money.
Labour with the same content can therefore be both productive and unproductive.
Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorisation. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital.
The third issue is whether or not ‘patrons’ should underwrite art. In short, yes they ‘should.’ But there are many reasons why they won’t. Crying into the timeline about ‘thielbux’ or ‘patronage schemes’ simply will not work.
And nobody who is making ‘art’ in any domain should make art to attract patrons. They must spin silk as an expression of their nature. Later on, they must become capitalists and deal in commodities. In short, they have to account for taste and the market. Shakespeare managed to square the circle in his lifetime. Others will have to settle for a posthumous birth.
It is unfortunate. There used to be an ecosystem of editors and publishers and journalists and book reviewers and, in short, Readers, who could help the Artist find his way to acclaim. The game has changed. The channels of distribution and discovery have changed. The institutional gatekeepers no longer seek talent, they prop up puppets and screen out whole groups of talented individuals. They cut down tall poppies and try to buckbreak the sensitive young men.
I’m not going to revisit the many great articles and tweets and substack articles. But that should suffice to set the table.
I think we have a great number of ‘frustrated artists’ who had to get into politics because they were denied their chance, or gatekept out of the big leagues, or pivoted towards where the incentives are. Frustrated artists, it might be suggested, are fundamentally bad for a society that wishes to reproduce itself stably.
You can see this sometimes. The podcast host looks listless or bored; just exhausted by discourse and metapolitics. It becomes a ‘counter signal the countersignalers’ game.
Rufo would have liked to be a documentarian and filmmaker. He does not want to be referee of the right wing. I don’t mean this negatively, at all; his skill at trolling libtards rests on his command of Gramsci. His playbook is clear. But I think if he could a button, and wake up the next day as a filmmaker or director, I don’t think he’d hesitate.
Sam Hyde would have liked to be a showrunner for sketches; perhaps even a director and actor in comedic films. He is a great example of artistic success despite difficulties. But it took 15 years, and he still has to do lots of ‘video game streams’ and a sort of ‘internet irony’ shtick that he does seem to be a bit tired of. (World Peace and Extreme Peace are incredible. Fishtank is innovation. One must wonder what Sam Hyde could have done with Adult Swim money.) He has also built a pocket universe of talent, and given them platforms and careers. If you’re going to be an ‘artist’ today you need the endurance and the grit that he has demonstrated.
The c*mtown guys - stavvy/adam/nick - would have been the natural ‘successors’ to run SNL or do adam sandler/judd apatow style edgy/raunchy comedies. Each podcast they did has the premise for a half dozen great movies. Saturday Night Live stole directly from them. That they are relegated to ‘senior podcasters’ on the circuit, and cutting ads for Mamdani, and grilling politicians, is better than if they never achieved anything. But they should have each wrote and produced a half dozen movies already.
We can take this further. Most big accounts on twitter would have been novelists and writers. BAP/Lomez/REN would be slightly controversial but tenured professors. Delicious Tacos would be a literary & romantic novelist with a few of his stories optioned into edgy romance movies. Orkbrand, Matt Forney, the list goes on. These types of men would have been the novelists and directors generating American culture if the cultural transmission, talent scouting, and succession planning throughline from the 90s was not broken in the 2010s.
Even established novelists - like Walter Kirn - have to do their duty on the podcast circuit to stay visible. Stephen King has found a second wind being a hyper libtard on Twitter.
Dozens of great youtubers would have been exceptional television directors and writers. Those who make great hype edits and short clips would have made brain worm commercials that sold product and drove culture. The only real exception to this rule, Mr. Beast, points to how many failed.
There’s an infographic/factoid from a few years ago: chinese kids want to be engineer and astronauts; american kids want to be youtubers. Cue hand wringing. The intuition of youth sensed that other things - movie star actor - beloved novelist - celebrated artist - was beyond reach; and the lesser mortals who worked for a job’s wages were fools.
Even Donald Trump, prior to 2015, probably could have been gainfully employed/distracted as a TV producer/host - greenlighting films - a Trump Studios would have made all the sense in the world in the 2000s and 2010s.
We could increase this list ad infinitum.
There are thousands of talented trained actors waiting tables in Los Angeles and New York. They will never get their chance. There are thousands of brilliant sensitive artists who won’t ever get a first look from a literary agent.
Casting directors and agents consider your social media profile in whether or not you get a part. Of course, if you’re a nepo baby to the film set born, you’re already likely to get engagement in a way that the bright young nobody from Nebraska cannot capture (without going into onlyfans). Another irony here; if you do background work, a la central casting, and you do ‘nude work’ (a dead body, an HBO orgy scene, etc.,) you get a great pay bump for the day, but you get blacklisted by Disney from being considered for ‘real’ parts.
The derailing of ‘white guy writers’ probably goes back to James Frey and “A Million Little Pieces.” He was the last youngish male writer I remember getting TV slots. The writer’s climate was so bad even then that the only way forward was using a marginalized/victim label - that of a drug addict - and the moment that got put under the magnifying glass - it derailed his career. And even this was somewhat derivative - hiding behind the shadow of David Foster Wallace. So either you slot yourself in as a drug addict who recovered to get the sympathy, or you join the hard fantasy sci-fi scene, or you try and push into the narrow band of Tom Clancy style writing. Jack Carr did this, and it was a great book and TV series. But ‘Navy SEAL’ is a shorthand that sells books in the same way that ‘heroin junkie’ does. And the genuinely talented ones never get their first chance at bat. The whole field remains essentially fossilized - the big names of the 90s are still the big names now.
Hypothetically - how many POC/LGBT/ETC writers have had to withstand that kind of scrutiny? I can’t think of any big cases where a career was ruined for plagiarism or ‘journalism.’ The nearest later stories - Claudine Gay and academic plagiarism - this hurt the institution - but the person has not really been destroyed. And Ibram Kendi’s star waned primarily because his institute was misspending large amounts of money.
And this is to step entirely over two things, of which one we must return to, and the other we hope not to - the first is the rise of AI in generating text - the second is female smut. Of this latter; it is a growth market. It gets clicks. All we can say is that it suffocated a large part of the book buying market. Emma Bovary on fentanyl. witness exhibit 1 (don’t click).
It doesn’t take a lot of work or digging to make the same case with film. Aside from a handful of ‘superstars’ who get selected - Chris Pratt - Adam Driver - Pedro whatever - the universe of ‘actors’ is much smaller. If you look at the 90s or the 70s or the 50s the universe was much bigger. There were big personalities competing for great parts. This spills over into directing and casting and writing.
Once reliable IPs - star trek star wars and lord of the rings - to name the three titans - have been killed and their corpses have become the sport of necrophiliacs.
Rogan got into podcasting because he wasn’t booking any steady work. There’s a different timeline - not too far fetched - in which a sane hollywood mints him into an action hero - a fixture equal to the Rock or Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt - a marquee must see A-list. this was probably his hope. Fear Factor was a fallback. Podcasting was a hobby.
And this whole domain - podcasting - has become the refuge of alot of failed comedians (most comedians could have been actors). Podcasting has become so predictable and useful for a ‘brand’ that even the biggest actors have been forced onto the genre. And there’s a whole cottage industry of these big stars bitching and moaning about the fall of Hollywood. Peak podcast seems like an obvious corollary to Hollywood at an all time low. The fact is that if a fraction of the kit and talent dedicated to ‘high production value’ podcasting were to be used in making short films or amateur films - much of the podcasting class would be more fulfilled human beings.
Just to square up the basic facts. Metoo and Weinstein stuff was not the beginning of a problem. it was the final step in a long campaign. It was the coup that killed the king and installed a regency council of wicked brigands.
This brings us back to one of the silliest events in world history. On a par with Gavrilo Princip. Yes. Ethics in video game journalism. Gamergate. I won’t pretend to know the lore with any depth. The short version of the story is that ‘journalists’ who wrote about games and reviewed them, were often sexually and financially involved with the game studios that they should have been scrutinizing with detachment and impartiality.
Video games, even as late as the mid 2010s, were entirely walled off from the larger culture. So when these journalists, nagging about SJW stuff and chiding about insensitive Xbox voice chat culture, were revealed to be more or less prostitutes in principle, it triggered a backlash that can be drawn pretty neatly into the beginning of the 2015 trump campaign. A good book should be written about the narrow slice of time starting with Gamergate to the announcement of Trump’s run for office, up to the death of Harambe.
All of this is to say is that politics corroded every artistic domain. The gatekeepers and tastemakers who installed themselves at crucial intersections screened out raw talent and smothered artists and creators with the wrong inclinations.
Left wing art was tried and found wanting. It was forcefed down the throat of the consumer. It was mandated in corporate offices. It was the guiding spirit that rejected my novels and screenplays, and the works of thousands of others.
And now lots of unappreciated artists have been forced into the arena.
In the Soviet Union, political repression was omnipresent. Art and humor and expression found fullest flower in more abstract domains like chess or music or cinema in part because it had to sublimate the political instinct and to insist that it must nevertheless say something important. There was no ‘right wing art question’ in the Soviet Union. There was art that was too good to deny, and too above politics to be pulled down again.
If you go to other time periods - the court of Elizabeth I - or the Sun King - art flourished. Patronage gave artists status and freedom to ply their craft. they could hobnob with the wellborn nepo babies. And the Monarch could behold the swelling scene.
You could tease the monarch a bit. You could satirize a sticky situation at court. But Lèse-majesté - an offense upon the sanctity dignity and divinely appointed Monarch - could see everything taken from you and have you and your family crushed by the boot of the state.
A certain kind of artist - and a certain kind of monarch we must also confess - absolutely relish this tension about where the line is drawn before one steps into Lèse-majesté and earns themselves proscription exile or death. Voltaire comes to mind. James the First does too.
We could of course cite the twitter canard about the Kings Two Bodies. You can mock the man who is King - indeed James Gilray and others were capable of the kind of criticism and cruelty towards the throne that maybe some presidents in some democracies would not tolerate today. But if you mock the King - in some sense the Realm and its Welfare - in such a way as to threaten the stability and prosperity of the Kingdom - you must be crushed underfoot. Your jibes and quips will bring even more laughter behind closed doors by those who know this difference.
This might be a good starting point for the tension between the artist and the sovereign.
But who might be the ‘monarch’ now? who could commit Lèse-majesté? against whom?
(if you say DA JOOS - please do not pass go - do not collect $200 dollars - go to jail)
Only Pharaoh and Herod come to mind as starting point for this question. They are the ones who murder babes and infants en masse at scale to prevent any such counter-elite, creative class, jesters, or vessels of a higher purpose.
The fact is that Pharaoh and Herod - whoever they are - have had at least two or three generations of systematic infanticide - aimed at blotting out any talent - pulling up every ladder - and starving every industry and field and vocation of leadership and aptitude - that at least one or two generations have come up under the boot of Pharaoh and Herod - and have never even been offered the fig leaf of status or a spot at court or chance to be measured on their merits.
They have delved too deep and too greedily. They killed very canary that might warn them of the dangers.
Pharaoh and Herod might be the boomers. They might be the post 1945 pocket universe of American unipolar hyperpower. They might the value of a dollar in 1980. They might be Steven King and John Cleese aghast at ‘the world today.’
Pharaoh and Herod might be the self-appointed postmodernists who turned into committed activists once they covered the tablets in dust. Those married to an ideological agenda, in Hollywood, in publishing, in the art gallries, did all they could to kill the newborn Israelites.
To bring this back to at least a provisional answer, a possible solution.
If you are an artist, you must raise your sights a bit higher. You must first of all, be allowed to survive the threshing. And then, you must take a long exile. And when you return, to face Pharaoh, you must do so from a higher plane. It can’t be a contest to reinsert yourself into Egyptian status games. You don’t return, like Moses, demanding the Israelites get grants and stipends and sinecures from Pharaoh.
If you are an artist, you must lead your people to a new domain.