When I Paint My Masterpiece: Amiri Baraka On Art And Revolution

I consider myself a fan of Amiri Baraka. I was both surprised and pleased that he actually entered the fray of partisan politics by supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama. I also figured he would be, as we all were, disappointed and disillusioned by an actual Obama Administration.

He has a piece in First Things that deals with this disappointment. My problem with what Baraka has to say, however, is the way, in the end, he marginalizes real social and political action even as he names the Opposition.

here’s no more resonant example of tragic contradiction throughout our history than the perversion of the 14th amendment. Passed after the overthrow of Chattel Slavery it was intended to give Equal Protection under the law to every person in the U.S. But, according to some observers (see Thom Hartman’s book, Unequal Protection, The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights), a clerk of the court – a former railroad president – changed the language of the actual decision to address a matter not originally at issue. The upshot was equal protection for corporations which the legal ruling endowed artificially with personhood.

The irony was that a law intended to protect the rights of ex-slaves, particularly in the south, was twisted to protect corporations who were now said to possess the same rights. Though of course a corporation is not human any more than a corpse is alive. Even if it’s an entity with the power of, say, General Motors, whose gross income is larger than the entire GNP of Afro America. (At 700 billion a year, Afro America ranks 16th in the world. General Motors is 15th.)

It’s not cynicism to say than that in exchange for Emancipation from the private owner, black and white workers could now be wage slaves to the corporate entity, now protected as a fake human being, just like Frankenstein or the Golem.

This is another aspect of what Obama’s presidency should teach us, the corporate domination of the U.S. and the corporate domination of the world. What is called Globalization. The international domination of the world by imperialism. If we followed the struggle to pass the very modest healthcare bill against the power and strength of the corporations and their ubiquitous lobbyists.

This is pretty standard fare, really.

Baraka makes a move toward more peripheral issues.

If we try to understand that the U.S is, itself, in essence a Corporate Dictatorship, then it will be easier to understand why the arts, even education, for the people, is undervalued. As the man said, the “unpredictability” of the arts, artists etc. means that art may say something the corporations oppose or detest.

Suppose we are burdened, we extreme cases, by Keats and DuBois, believing their charge that the only directives the artist must follow are Truth and Beauty? Then woe is us, since in a world where corporate control drenches everything in lies (whether lipstick or liquor) and demands ugliness, or at least shallowness, as beauty-proof accessories to keep many of us from knowing truth. Then where does that leave us?

There is a censorship based on the rule of corporations and their monopoly capitalist ideology. But that doesn’t mean only the excision of words or images in certain paintings (as Rockefeller once did when he spotted Lenin in one of Diego Rivera’s murals which he’d commissioned). Corporate control means that certain areas of human experience, of human thought cannot even be expressed. And if by some great effort, those thoughts get out, corporate influence will render them (according to other soi disant artists) inartful or otherwise inappropriate.

Beyond censorship, the other tragic dimension of corporate control is that it trivializes for the sake of commerce all thought that’s not ruled out of bounds. A world that once spoke of art adhering to the will of the prophets has been bent and mutated by those with an addiction to maximum profits.

First of all, artists have almost always been prostitutes. The great Renaissance painters were whores for the Medici. Mozart served the Emperor. The myth of the starving artist - personified by drunken Van Gogh dying in penury only to have his work become, posthumously, a valuable commodity - is an exception that proves the rule. The Romantic vision of artists as servants of Truth seems noble, but is belied by much of the history of art. Most served filthy lucre via whoever was willing to pay the bills.

That Baraka would bemoan the elimination of public subsidy of the arts seems odd. If, indeed, we have lived for a century and quarter in a Corpocracy, the funds supplied to the arts have always come with the proviso that the product serve the paymaster. As usual. Baraka avoids this particular trap by declaring most of the art so produced as incredibly ugly, worthless from an aesthetic point of view. Without offering any examples, he makes the claim that the commodification of the arts, hand in hand with public funding, debases the arts.

Serving higher masters, artists must be the vanguard of the revolution, it seems.

While this Romantic notion exists at the heart of so much discussion of the arts, it is fanciful. Poets, painters, musicians can certainly serve the end of social justice. All the same, they are no less servants of greater paymasters then than they are under capitalism. The final point - creating national and international means for pursuing social change - really has very little to do with Art, and rather than the last item on the agenda, should always be the first. This reversal ends up rendering impotent any pursuit of real justice; if the first concern is beauty in service of truth, the hungry and oppressed remain so.