Dak
mentat
Name a contemporary artist who you feel is intervening in politics in a distracting way.
There's far too much subjectivity and dilution and obfuscation through various degrees of participation to even begin to charge any artist, particularly contemporarily, with intervention. This is the same problem with democratic politics. No one vote is to blame, all the way up to any particular Senator.
More blame lays at the foundation in such a dispersed environment of responsibility, as they are the appeal for authority for those that come after. Another problem for artists is they have no actual skin in the game; that is, responsibility for the consequences of the outcomes they advocate for do not fall back on them. Sure, artists are persecuted when they present work against a tyrannical regime, but that is not skin in the game in the same manner. They are held responsible for pissing off power, not for outcomes they advocated for. An important difference. This is not a problem limited to artists. It is a cancer on/of modernity.
This isn't true at all. In fact, I'd argue that some of the best works of art resist any appeal to pathos. Some readers (or viewers) might have emotional reactions, but the works that stand the test of time are those that return their audiences to uncertainty over their convictions.
This doesn't mean that art doesn't contain truths, but that it encourages its readers to participate in a conversation that privileges no one side. I tell my students this every semester, because they insist on saying things like "Pynchon argues": authors don't argue anything, they don't preach a view or an ideal or a political stance (good ones, anyway--which is why Ayn Rand is a shit writer). Authors present a multitude of views, they present a dialogue, and challenge their readers to navigate that dialogue.
Art is only unsuited for argumentation to the extent that art shouldn't promote any single argument; it should promote a multitude of arguments.
Fiction is narrative, and the target of the narrative is emotion. Otherwise you write non-polemical non-fiction. I haven't read Pynchon, but he does argue. Even if he doesn't have an answer, he wants people to question the things he questions, and he introduces uncertainties as per his dislikes and uncertainties. And bears no consequence for anyone he ruins in doing so. Zeno did this, and would still take an arrow to the knee (or supposedly lost his head).
PS: Ayn probably was a shit writer. I have yet to waste my time reading her. I can/could get the necessary information without weeding through the obfuscation of her narratives.
I'm not anti-emotion by the way in any way, but it has no direct connection to fact, and does at least as much harm as good - which persons like myself have to play cleanup for. I consider narratives playing with fire, and generally by figurative pyromaniacs, even if by accident of ignorance in however many cases.
The following isn't even remotely my wife's most technical piece, nor one of the ones which she won an award for, but it is my favorite piece. What is the narrative or the dialogue in this:
