Essay: Should Artists Be Committed?

Christ's Descent into Hell by Hieronymus Bosch. Fig. 6. Detail of Sisyphus in 26.244. On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 613

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No, not committed like that. Many in the arts have effectively bought—hook, line and sinker—into French writer Jean-Paul Sartre’s dictum that one must be committed—that one must choose a hill to die on, get a tattoo, join a cult of brand, and be an activist to the death. A symptom, notwithstanding an arguable amount of social progress, has been that certain things deemed vague and self-gratifying have been devalued in...

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No, not committed like that. Many in the arts have effectively bought—hook, line and sinker—into French writer Jean-Paul Sartre’s dictum that one must be committed—that one must choose a hill to die on, get a tattoo, join a cult of brand, and be an activist to the death. A symptom, notwithstanding an arguable amount of social progress, has been that certain things deemed vague and self-gratifying have been devalued in favor of the righteous wrath of moral clarity.

Sartre’s thoughts on this are most clearly outlined in What Is Literature? (Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, 1947), in which—following the forces of his day—he concludes that writers (and by extension, artists) have a moral obligation to engage with the political and social issues of their time. That—all in all—art should not be made “for art’s sake” but should strive to change the world, ostensibly through direct political engagement. This has been found to be the clear view of many of the loudest and brashest figures in the art world and contemporary criticism today, and I have found few alternatives to the rule.

Sartre’s contemporary, Albert Camus, famously split with him on this matter. As Sartre followed his own principles into action, he inevitably drew towards Marxism, and then to the French Communist Party. Adam Gopnik makes an astute parallel, in Facing History for The New Yorker, that this was a bit like the French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s dive into Christianity a couple centuries before; who wrote: “the faith might be true, so why not embrace it, since you lose nothing by the embrace, and get at least the chance of all the goodies the faith promises?” Camus did not take communism quite as far as Sartre, and in 1951, broke with both him, and his magazine, Les Temps Modernes.

In the essay which spelled the end of their collaboration, L’Homme révolté (The Rebellious Man), Camus acknowledges a certain absurdity about our existence that renders absolute commitment impossible. He writes: “Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate,” while “absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.”

While Sartre was writing his tract on political commitment, Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, Camus was working on Le mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), in which, rather than linking happiness to meaning, progress and moral righteousness, he proposes that happiness comes from lucid defiance and the act of living with full awareness of life’s absurdity. He concludes his essay—about the mythical king condemned to repetition—with “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

The question—if we are to be a progressive society—is whether deviance from #000000 and #FFFFFF should exist in art today. Or should artists die on their hill, martyrs for their cause? How can we explore controversial themes, if we cannot… explore them? How can the arts—film, literature, music—continue to be inventive in this fractured landscape of Sartrean confidence? And how can we balance the powerful need to frown, with a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, all in a world with no absolute judge?

The answer, for me, lies in a frequently over-cited quote by Bertrand Russell from New York American, The Triumph of Stupidity (1933), that “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Responses to this opinion article are encouraged.

Essay: Should Artists Be Committed?

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