I was struck by Lisa Solod Warren's recent piece, Why Do Republicans Hate Artists and Writers So Much? Ms. Warren is certainly better informed on the NEA and related issues than I am, as well as a far more celebrated writer. Consequently I was surprised when my primary reaction to her post was frustration. I kept exhorting, “You're a smart bitch! Answer the question, dammit!”

Then I noticed there were no fewer than 17 question marks in Ms. Warren's post, and most of her declarative sentences only service to elaborate on the questions. Suddenly I thought I thought to myself, “Socrates is taunting you, fool!”

So stand back, Ms. Warren; not only am I on to your game, but I've just gotten home with five pounds of the finest espresso civilization has yet achieved, and I'm fixin' to go off.

Life

Then everyone I knew dropped dead, Reagan disdained to notice and his advisors sat behind closed doors, cackling like crows and high-fiving each other over the body count. (It's amazing what Republican closet cases will tell you if you wear a tight t-shirt and pay for their drinks.) I lived in DC then, so I pulled my head out of my ass (pop!) and marched it down to the White House, over to the Capitol, out to NIH, and did the things that good angry faggots did in those days.

The group snogging while plasticuffed in the back of a paddy wagon turned out to be heady stuff, and thus encouraged, I expanded my scope. I fetched and carried when some brilliant uptivists projected Robert Mapplethorpe's work on the walls of the Corcoran Gallery – the cowardly institution that, cowed by conservative pressure, had cancelled their exhibition of it. I trotted over to the National Portrait Gallery and had a look at Andres Serrano's now infamous Piss Christ. (Kind of murky, but the rest of The Photography of Invention show was great.) One day I found myself starting a spontaneous chorus of “Every Sperm Is Sacred” to entertain the Catholic picketers of a production of Christopher Durang's, The Marriage of Bette & Boo. (We'll leave out what I wore to the even more enthusiastically picketed Last Temptation of Christ. You get the idea.

Art and death taught me things I didn't want to know, and grief and anger made me an apt pupil. I realized I'd based my own relationship to the larger culture on the unexamined assumption that, whatever our differences, almost all of us wish one another well. Perhaps more to the point, I really had believed that, whatever my faults, most other people wished me well. I got my nose rubbed in the fact that, for a great many people – particularly powerful people – “common” and “good” are mutually exclusive. I felt like the woman I had met in an emergency room who kept slurring, through what was left of her mouth, “I know I'm not the best wife, but he oughtn't to have done me like this, and he oughtn't to have laughed after.”

When conservatives pursue a destructive agenda, liberals too often assume that they're misguided – that they somehow just don't understand. In fact, they understand very well and it is we who are confused. We don't acknowledge that powerful conservatives want to conserve nothing beyond their own power, wealth, and privilege. They might squabble for position at the top of the hierarchy, but they don't question the hierarchy itself and will do what it takes to preserve it. To even imagine the existence of any other way of life is to threaten their wealth, power, privilege, and entitlement – their very identities.

Might is always right for the mighty. When the cult of might achieved inevitably becomes the church of things as they are, “But what if...?“ is blackest heresy. After all, imagination is by definition the act of envisioning things as they are not, and so is always a potential threat to things as they are. Imagination leads to desire and desire leads to change, and art is just one of the names we apply to the expression of the imagination.

Art

Powerful Republicans assume that sufficient personal wealth will enable them to buy all the cardiologist waiting room originals they like, and that the National Gallery of Art already has a safely dead collection sufficient to bore school children from here to eternity. They're correct on both counts.

This is no different from their stances on health care or education: the egregiously rich can buy themselves and their children whatever they want or need, and the rest is just window dressing for the booboise, too deluded or ignorant to act or vote in their own best interests.   

Art as product is not at issue here. Conservatives have nothing against painting and writing and dancing and all that other stuff. They adore art-as-object, provided it exists primarily as a status symbol for sale in a free market, which is to say, one that is controlled by what the egregiously wealthy choose to pay for. To be fair, they aren't entirely averse to a touch of revolution or the occasional joke at their expense. It's fun to flirt with other points of view, provided it never gets beyond the whiff of garlic in a good salad. Young people are free to take off all their clothes on stage occasionally, in between annual productions of The Nutcracker – after all, dancers are awfully pretty. But it's understood that when the nudity threatens conventional sexual or social boundaries, patronage vanishes and the curtain comes down.

Similarly, it's fine for entertainment to masquerade as art, or even (who knows?) be art. Having an entire populace debating the obscenity of an aging pop star's breast is bread that's cheap to bake and a circus that's its own ringmaster. In fact, it's one more thing to invest in, and if you've the resources, you can make a profit off that too. Titillation is good product, provided it never arouses anyone to action. Revolution is terrible for business, provided business is defined as “business as usual.”

Art, however, consists of seeing, in both its creation and its appreciation. When I know a work of art, I know a worldview other than my own. A painting is a window into another universe where what I regard as natural law may not apply. Unlike heavy drugs, poetry can alter my perceptions permanently while leaving open the possibility of future alterations. Music is a chance to try another endocrine system on for size. A novel is as close as I can get to actually walking life in another's shoes. Sculpture questions my perceptions of the spatial universe and my own place it. Dance moves my imaginary body in ways that can make my actual physical self feel vulnerable, damaged, or exalted.

In knowing art, we challenge what we think we know, including our knowledge of ourselves. Art has the power to transform us in ways we can't anticipate, and doesn't ask for our consent.

Great art is ambiguous and open to interpretation. It's closer to the ever-vulnerable hypotheses of science than the incontrovertible truths of religion. My ninth grade creative writing teacher scribbled in red, “If you can't show me, please don't tell me.” Politicians, pundits, clerics, and experts tell us and tell us and tell us. Then art comes along and shows us, and more threatening still, shows us a different face every time we encounter it. What we are shown can reveal unexpected and inconvenient truths, conveying the sort of knowledge that leads us to question what “everybody knows.” When art comes in the palace window, the Emperor Status Quo, having no clothes, shivers violently in the draft.

All of this can only harm the conservative cause, and unlike liberals, powerful conservatives know it. Anyone whose power and privilege are based on business as usual may quite rightly perceive art as a threat. There's no understanding that doesn't violate some preconception and there is no beauty that doesn't include some element of the strange. Art is subversion. Art is the antithesis of “as it was, is now, and ever shall be.” Art, life like, is in continuous flux; it's the tomorrow that refutes yesterday. NEA funding can only lead to more Serranos, Mapplethorpes, and ever worse ruptures in the hull of the quotidian, even as such works roil the waters of our cultural assumptions.

The powerful quite sensibly regard any attempt to use public funds to support art they themselves would not buy as a revolutionary act, akin to using the Navy to torpedo their yachts. Art is penetration, and we all know how the straight white men who've traditionally owned the western world feel about that.

Why do republicans hate artists and writers so much? Conservatism is at its core based on the fear of change – it seeks to conserve an imagined status quo. That the past conservatives cling to at all costs is undeniably their own artistic fabrication is ironic, but deters them not at all. Like the religious dogma with which it shares so much, conservatism is a brittle ideology that can't change or progress without shattering.   Like religion, conservatism can't thrive in diversity and must oppress other points of view to survive. Now more than ever, conservatism is demonstrably a lie that won't survive examination, and art, as always, has the potential to demand that we “Look at this!”

Why do conservatives fear and hate art? Because art is the agent of change, and for conservatives, change is the Angel of Death.