This is oddly fascinating in the sense that it doesn't appear that the writer has spent any time with actual artists. He has so little understanding of why or how people make art.
He’s actually making a good point: that what presents as “good conservative art” is actually bad, even if financially successful, and the art that conservatives abhor because of the politics behind it (“Barbie,” Taylor Swift music) is actually good. What he doesn’t grapple with is why that is.
His solution is a kind of conservative Renaissance prince to fund good “conservative” art.
But he refuses to address Occam’s razor: that what makes the good “liberal” art good is, in part, its liberalism. Maybe Barbie didn’t make billions *despite* its feminist message.
A lot of my favorite writing is conservative at its core (mystery novels, some of Evelyn Waugh) but I’m not sure a lot of art works when the main message is petty cruelty or ‘screw you all.’
Left wing action movies? Like Robocop? Or Starship Troopers? But it's not all Verhoeven. Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds? Ravenous (maybe action)? One could well argue the Mad Max movies are inherently left wing. There's tons!
Definitely, and they're great! But the joke is about the avengers going through the UN to lodge a firm resolution to the problem, instead of just fighting Ultron.
Art, in particular “good art,” is an act of creation. Creation is an act of change. It can challenge, but let’s stick with change as enough. Conservatism is a position opposed to change. That makes “good conservative art” a very tall order. I’m reductive, but still.
But we already have conservative art: endless AI renderings of an improbably jacked Donald Trump with no shirt on holding a machine gun. What more do they want?
That author is circling something academia has accounted for since the Nazis. The further rightwards the POV gets, the more urgent the need to turn the "art" into propaganda. Could be the same with leftist extremists, but the culture is left of center aligned.
