by Joe Siano
The Manhattan Transfer just came to town.. Their set included
a performance of Cantaloop.
Their Cantaloop is a four-part vocal harmony adaption of the
Us3 1993 hip-hop appropriation of Herbie Hancock’s 1964 Cantaloupe Island.
This evolution of this piece is an example of how ideas
grow, morph and are enhanced in a free society. Edmund Burke nailed it by
observing that society is “a partnership not only between those who are living,
but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be
born.”
Great ideas in art, culture, technology and commerce coalesce
though trial and error and are continually refashioned and retooled over the course
of centuries and millennia. Hayek
calls this “emergent order” and “distributed knowledge”. No one person or community has all the
answers. New knowledge and ideas are
invented in the daily struggle of living and vetted in the marketplace of
ideas.
However, the totalitarian mind does not work that way. Socialists, Fascists and all other Utopians
latch on the teaching of a Great Man. A visionary. A messiah.
Once in charge, it's his way or the highway, Or the gulag. Or the grave –
which is often best.
In the West, the artistic community typically purports to be
freedom’s defenders. They rightly demand
that the State steer clear of touching their work. However, it is also the artist who are most ardently insists that this same State lord over every other facet of such as–
education, commence, healthcare, food, farming, childcare, housing, family life
– you name it.
But the State’s Elites are no dummies, they understand that the
arts speak louder and cut deeper to the heart than speeches, policy papers and scholarly
diatribes. The arts pluck the emotional
strings. They hypnotize and in doing so,
blunt reason and rationality.
Consider the Twentieth Century’s great experiments in central
planning.
To be published in the Soviet Union required membership in Soyuz
Pisateley, the official writer’s union that censored content and mandated
style. Free expression could only be
achieve only through tortured
underground networks.
In Maoist China, the government “sought to modernize China
across all aspects of society, a process that included suppressing or
destroying much of traditional culture. The government also sought to create
a new visual culture to communicate its goals and ideology to the Chinese
people.”
“Artists were encouraged to create art that reflected the
evolutionary spirit of the time, in Mao’s words, to create art for the people.
The impact of this directive on artists and art making was enormous. Oil
painting in a socialist realist style replaced ink painting which had been one
of the most revered art forms in China for over one thousand years—as the preferred painting style. Revolutionary heroes, such
as workers, soldiers, and peasants replaced traditional subjects such as
landscapes, birds, and flowers.
…..senior artists, especially ink painters, were
subjected to public humiliation and sometimes torture, and their homes and
artworks were seized and destroyed
Hitler, himself an aspiring but failed artist, appreciated
the power of symbolism to command his nation’s soul. The Third Reich’s official architect Albert
Speer built garish
monumental structures that extolled the supremacy of the State versus the
insignificance of the individual.
As in other the other socialist states, the Nazi Germany oversaw all forms
of creative expression including films, photography, sculpture, painting
poster art and even children’s books such as The
Poisonous Mushroom. Its message: "Just
as it is difficult to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, it is often
hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal."
Castro’s
artistic repression killed the Cuban mambo music industry. Cuban music dominated the charts worldwide
in the ‘50s and early ’60s. Fidel saw it
to be ant-revolutionary and put a lid on it.
This opened the way for Jamaican reggae to upstage Cuban music within a
decade.
Here in the U.S., the Thought Police are tearing down public
art, banning unpopular opinion from campuses and mandating pronoun usage.
The State corrupts art just as it corrupts everything it
touches. No one saw this better than George Orwell, whose dystopian new order included
Ministries
of Love, Peace, Plenty and Truth to control all that citizens, think, say
and do.
Whether the State be called Socialist, Fascist or Progressive, nearly all
modern states are subject to Managerial Control. So says James Burnham in The
Managerial Revolution. He maintains
that the all of the aforementioned ideological labels are thinly veiled rationalizations. Ideology, Left or Right, lulls complacent
sheeple to turn over the keys to unseen elites.
The cult of personality personifies ideology and makes
submission to the Great One, a personal conversion experience. Statist art is the spoonful of sugar that
that helps the medicine go down.
Related Articles:
"Half
the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
