Living in interesting times

There is nothing new about artists engaging in the politics of their communities. The plays of Aristophanes savaged the excesses of Athenian leaders, and oppositional movements in Rome ranged from Juvenal’s satires to the blunter political graffiti citizens scrawled on the walls of Pompeii. 

Censorship was sometimes stricter in Europe’s Middle Ages but, by the Renaissance, Bruegel’s paintings fiercely contrasted the privations of the workers with the comfortable excesses of the wealthy. And, in the five centuries from his day to ours, artists have recurrently threaded social and political criticism through their work, sometimes allegorically veiled, sometimes aggressively direct. 

Artists feel the need to speak out on political and social issues differently at different times and in different circumstances but, against the background of the angry turbulence of today’s politics, it was uncomfortable to read Arts Council England (ACE) including a new section in their 2023–26 Relationship Framework on ‘reputational risk’, warning artists and arts organisations against including “overtly political” statements in their work.   

Although ACE quickly retreated from that widely criticised position, developments around the world this year have moved in so many darker, more dangerous directions that light shone in the darkness by artists feels more important than ever – wherever you look.

Polarising movements

This year’s large number of elections in which centrist incumbents lost ground to more polarising movements, from France and Germany to South Africa, South Korea, Japan and the USA, seems to be pointing us into a new, more combative politics. Even in the UK, the outcome of the Conservative leadership election (in which just 95,000 party members voted), seems likely to mark another step to the right from a centrist, more consensual approach to politics.  

The wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East are exactly the kinds of conflict the United Nations (UN) and its Security Council were created to prevent (if possible) and control (if not). But the UN has never seemed so powerless in the face of determined leaders as in the ten years since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, a helpless bystander watching the steady rise of autocrats disregarding both the rule of law and all human rights norms – most of them also climate crisis deniers.

Though it received little attention in the UK, the 16^th BRICS Summit in October saw a further evolution of the fast-growing global alliance originally built around Russia and China. New members include countries like Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and BRICS now boasts 45% of the world’s population and a GDP greater than the G7 countries.

Every day, BRICS seems a step nearer its goal of replacing Western democratic governance by a multipolar world, characterised by the transactional ‘strongman’ language of autocracies rather than the rules-based foundations on which the post-war democratic order has been built. In his eventual comment on the election of Donald Trump, Putin noted contentedly that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing”.

Global instability

This is not a new trend. Larry Diamond writing in Foreign Affairs identifies the high water mark of democracy as 2006, since when he maps the way democracy and freedom have been in steady retreat, adding to the increasingly ubiquitous sense of global instability – VUCA as the US Army War College once characterised the post-Cold-War world: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

There are many ways of analysing these interlinked changes, but the most characteristic symptom of them all is the way anger and a ‘post-truth’ culture of disinformation have now replaced evidence-based reason in so much political discourse. We have entered a dangerous tunnel of simplistic and reductivist binary choices, with banal slogans angrily hurled to and fro replacing the reasoned, respectful debate of former times.

And the vertiginously quick, omnivorous accumulation of power by the new online platforms has only accelerated this process, as Carole Cadwalladr described in her disturbing  Observer article last week. This retreat from rationality is not just a political abstraction. As Karthik Ramanna explores in The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World, nowadays it poses a constant, everyday challenge to anyone in any position of arts and cultural leadership.

The din of argument and discussion

Which brings us back to Aristophanes. It is hard to avoid seeing the world in which we are living, our world, as being in very real danger of being overrun by a more brutal, more dangerous tide than we have seen in our lifetimes, more and more remote from the values that used to be regarded as the essential bedrock of civil society. 

In an increasing number of countries the voices of dissent, even just of debate, are being silenced, and with every silenced voice one more feather of the beautiful bird that is our humanity is plucked out. This cannot be a moment in world history to be fussing about the ‘reputational risk’ of speaking truth to power. This is a moment when – more than ever – we need to hear and read and see from our visionary artists a reaffirmation of those essential human truths we are in such danger of losing. 

When John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1859 essay On Liberty that “knowledge arises only from the collision of truth with error” – in other words, true belief becomes knowledge only by emerging victorious from the din of argument and discussion – he was not arguing that we should avoid reputational risk. He was arguing for the absolute necessity of hearing opposed opinions as a route to truth. Artists have always played a crucial role in that discourse. 

In recent times, the voices of Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz and Wilfred Owen in World War I; Diego Rivera in Mexico; Nina Simone speaking for US Civil Rights; Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn during the dark Stalinist years; Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela denouncing apartheid, Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo in China, Václav Havel and The Charter 77 Movement in Czechoslovakia, and all the anonymous wall artists during the Arab Spring – they all played their own essential part in speaking of our common humanity in times and places when it was threatened. 

The last thing we need of our artists just now is to be concerned about reputational risk. We need the clarion call of their voices of truth, of defiance, of hope, more than we have ever needed it in our lifetimes.