On MAGA's "Golden Age" in Art.
A renaissance in American art and culture is sorely needed. It's unlikely to come from the right.
Trump made artists angry (again).
True to the brash garishness (or garish brashness) that defines his style, in February 2025 the 47th president announced:
He followed up with a "Best" which is dubious at best:
In the wake of the 2024 election an ascendant right wing has convinced itself that "Woke" is “dead.” Trump’s Kennedy Center seizure—an invasion of enemy territory—is seen as yet another nail in the coffin. Those of us who understand the proudly progressive artist community know better, however: all Trump has done is piss them off even more.
Cue the protests: prominent actress and filmmaker Issa Rae cancelled a sold-out show; Shonda Rhimes—one of the most powerful producers in television—stepped down from the Kennedy Center’s board; Jeffrey Sellers, lead producer of Broadway’s Hamilton, took the extraordinary step of cancelling an entire run of the hit musical slated to perform at the venue. Force may work when negotiating with cutthroat businessmen or foreign adversaries, but it will not compel artists to work on behalf of a president they despise.
And how does state intervention nurture art and culture? Doesn't MAGA want a reduction in the scale and scope of government? And if under prior administrations organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts could be criticized as ideological weapons for leftist radicalism, is federal support for ideologically-driven art from the other end of the spectrum any better?
The prospect of a "Golden Age of American Arts and Culture" should be unifying cause. Complaints of cultural stagnation are not merely right-wing railings against aesthetic decadence or the abandonment of classical forms and norms: in 2023 Jason Farago, arts writer for the New York Times, devoted 5,000 words to the subject of why "ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years."
Everyone recognizes the problem. But no one can force a renaissance into being. Moreover, given the collective attitude of the right wing* toward art and artists, the probability of Trump or MAGA or any non-leftist/non-liberal faction catalyzing a “Golden Age in Art in Culture” is next to nil.
"NO ONE CARES."
Those three words—tweeted by Megyn Kelly in response to Seller’s Hamilton cancellation announcement—go beyond sneering ownership of a sanctimonious, smugnorant liberal: they sum up the right’s attitude toward art and artists perfectly.
In today’s infantile zeitgeist “right wing” can mean anyone from disillusioned (ie “old school”) liberals to libertarians to conservatives. Through that lens there are far more right-leaning—or, at least, non-leftist—artists than anyone wants to acknowledge. But where leftist denial of the existence of these creatives is easily attributed to hubris and ideological bigotry, the right’s tragic flaw is pathological apathy.
Conservative journalist Mark Judge has called again and again and yet again for his ideological brethren to get in the game; outspoken conservative opera professionals Emilio Pons and Christopher Macchio are pleading for a post-woke Renaissance; the incendiary Heather Mac Donald is a passionate defender of art and culture, even devoting a surprisingly substantial portion of her most recent book to a depressing account of the “progressive” thrashing of America’s cultural institutions. Even self-proclaimed transgender feminist and atheist Camille Paglia has been urging conservatives to engage with art for two decades.
To the frustration of artists who reject Progressive fundamentalism—and there are many—such voices have fallen on deaf ears. How could they else, when the mere fact of being an artist seems so constitutionally opposed to being a rightist?
Rightists seek order, a career in the arts is chaos; rightists chase stability, artists chase dreams; rightists crave normal, artists defy normal. Artists live in emotion while the right asserts “facts don’t care about feelings.” The artist stays young at heart, the rightist demands we “grow up.” And where artistic libertinism may fuel excess profanity and prurience, rightist religiosity leads to excessive prudery far more often than to masterworks like The Lord of the Rings.
The issue is not lack of intellect or sophistication, contrary to leftist presumption. The artist is uncommonly sensual, the rightist preserves common sense. As one of my followers on Twitter asked bluntly: "how does art create roads, buildings, dams etc?" The question is annoying but far from stupid—a question any rational, practical person would offer: How is art useful? What does it do?
Such pragmatism is obviously vital to a functioning society. But the right’s dedication to consequential knowledge comes at a cost: the left has the pride, privilege and prestige of controlling such vaunted institutions as Juilliard, the Metropolitan Museum, the Metropolitan Opera, and Carnegie Hall (each just miles from one another, in a single city)—to say nothing of owning the music, entertainment and publishing industries. The right has zero cultural clout.
It doesn’t have to stay that way.
6 THINGS THE RIGHT CAN DO.
Rightists claim to love the “Marketplace of Ideas.” Yet the arts are humanity’s most effective vehicle for ideas, and the right has abandoned them. Simply bothering to take the arts seriously has enabled the left to exert sole authority over the hearts and minds of the public. In effect the left has become the soul of the American society—whether society likes it or not.
In dismissing the arts the right has crippled their capacity to contribute to American culture in a profound way—at a time when America not only clearly craves a change in the culture, but a time when [real cultural change is more possible than ever before:
The young (particularly men) and minorities are becoming immune to the far left lurch; corporations are dropping DEI initiatives; Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have created sharp ideological shifts in the tech space; Jeff Bezos has forcefully directed The Washingon Post to embrace free market ideas; celebrities are rocketing toward irrelevance. The time for a Renaissance is right now.
While content creation—posting, podcasting, independent journalism—has proven effective in breaking the left-wing monopoly over national discourse, culture creation is the next crucial step. If the arts don’t come naturally to the right, there is plenty that it can do to contribute to America's rich cultural tradition that are completely within its capabilities:
STOKE COMPETITION
The right understands the value of competition in sparking innovation and creativity. Many talented creatives are starving for heterodox institutions where they can ply their trade and take real risks without fear of cancellation. Audiences are desperate for such institutions as well. Those who invest in the creation of these institutions can not only enrich themselves, but all of society as well.INCENTIVIZE NEW INSTITUTIONS
The right understands the value of incentives. If the self-interest of producers, investors, private donors, business owners, realtors and more can be piqued—perhaps through tax breaks and credits—the capital for these competing institutions can more easily materialize.SUPPORT INDEPENDENTS
The right is sensitive to the problems of bureaucratic bloat and the stifling nature of rules and regulations. While new institutions are key, they risk running into the same problems. Fortunately enthusiasts can also support enterprising independents, such as Brandon Sanderson and Eric July, who’ve raised millions—in Sanderson’s case tens of millions—to create new culture.REVITALIZE EDUCATION
The right are sticklers for classical art and education. Prior renaissances were sparked by renewed interest in great works of antiquity; reviving classical liberal education—such as teaching the Trivium and exploring the great masters of old—will inspire a new generation, and cultivate broader artistic interest from a young age. The internet makes this possible at a scale never seen.MAKE ART MASCULINE AGAIN*
The right understands the value of men and masculinity. But young men as seeking identity, rejecting progressive and traditional labels, while the “manosphere” offers little more than nihilism, hedonism and materialism. Give men the gift of reminding them that they are among history’s finest poets, painters, playwrights, sculptors, novelists, filmmakers, composers, and beyond. As samurai and artist Miyamoto Musashi once wrote, a warrior must be as effective with a paintbrush as with a sword.RESPECT THE ARTS
The right understands the value of learning a trade. The arts are a trade. They require study, skill, practice, perseverance, discipline and vision to achieve excellence. They are also a manifestation of free expression and individualism; rightists who embrace these values should embrace artists as embodiments of these values—and realize that a society in which these concepts are denied the artist is not a free society.
You cannot bully a Golden Age of Art and Culture into being. Still, it’s refreshing for a Republican president to at least acknowledge the arts, and Trump’s instinct for sparking a revitalization in them positive. But you cannot force culture, it must be allowed to flourish.
The proper approach is not to bulldoze buildings.
Better to plant orchards instead.
* Yes, I know the acronym spells MAMA. Yes, it is funny.
I have a BA in Art and Design, so I've wrestled with this conundrum for years. While at university I attended a large student design conference in Chicago, during Obama's second presidential run. The guest speakers uniformly pushed Obama from the stage, but more remarkably, they did so as though everybody in the audience agreed with their position. During an open mic Q&A near the end, I asked if any of the presenters on stage—about 10 international, prestigious designers— considered themselves conservatives. They looked uncomfortable for a period of silence, then one said he considered himself moderate. I asked why there was such a lack of diversity among them, and whether they thought a conservative student would feel uncomfortable at the conference.
A day later, a presenter attempted to answer my question, and said what you have put forth: that conservatives are mainly concerned with tradition and rules, and that to be a good artist, you have to break the rules. So she was finding an intrinsic incompatibility with the conservative and the artistic temperament. I wanted to jump up from my seat and grab a mic again: You mean the student in the audience asking audacious and impertinent questions of the august artistic elite is IN the box? While everybody on stage being in political lock-step across cultures and countries over the entire world, they are OUT of the box? Who wielded the power in that situation? From my perspective as a student at a state school and throughout my public school education, the leftist position was clearly pushed by all my teachers and professors, and embraced by the leadership. My entire educational career was as a dissident outsider. That’s what conservatism meant to me.
I’ll give you one more stark counter-example to this conception of conservatives: during the pandemic, who followed the rules, and who rebelled? It was remarkable: I’d see tatted-up bikers at the grocery store, with every outer appearance of being trailblazers, hell-raisers, rebels, and artistically inclined if evidenced by the time and attention they paid to their visual presentation, and wearing damn masks. But I was taking it on the chin, so to speak, going all over God’s green earth with my bare face hanging out day after day, refusing to walk the right way on the arrows in the grocery store. Even Jordan Peterson has been trying to figure out how the world inverted during that time, with the split right down the political line: those who obeyed orders, ratted on their neighbors, pressured strangers in public, lost their minds—the liberals—and those who refused to comply, the conservatives. I’m thinking our understanding of conservatives is, at the very least, incomplete.
Why were so many great artists of the past Christians, whose values mainly aligned with their society’s? Their understanding of their faith and their place in the world didn’t preclude making true art. In fact they were compelled by their faith to make their art.
What I’m trying to demonstrate, is that the problem you rightly identify in the arts, can’t be explained by this charge that conservatives aren’t moved by art, don’t value it, and follow the rules. (I think Megyn Kelly's glib response was more that she doesn't care about the political tantrums of the leadership of Hamilton, but hopefully not that she doesn't care about the arts.) And I do agree there is a huge problem with either uninspired “conservative art,” or the absence of conservatives in the culture-making artistic spheres.
I’ll throw out some possibilities for the sake of furthering the inquiry:
- Did Dada and pop art alienate the average person so that their response to art was to be intimidated or confused and say, “I don’t get it”? Did this alienate artists from participating? Could this have been artificially manipulated by powers that wanted to destroy our culture? Did the ad nauseam debate about what constitutes art, culminating in more and more ridiculous installations that debased the endeavor, render modern art niche, bizarre, and unappealing?
- In my art classes, students were basically very nice kids who were artistically inclined, and our leftist professors would chide them for being too nice and not angry enough. They wanted leftist revolutionaries. What if you didn’t want to create art for leftist revolutions?
- Jordan Peterson says the enlightenment has failed, and is seeking a better philosophy. Can we say the diversion of the arts down its current path has also reached its natural end, all the rules have been broken, and we need to reorient?
- Was true artistic talent on the right simply gate-kept out of the public sphere? Do the rise of podcasts, GoFundMe's, x, etc. offer a remedy that artists are just starting to take advantage of?
These might be really bad ideas, but I'm throwing them out there to possibly spark some better ones.
I would start with the assumption that true artistic talent is spread all over the place, not held by one political side or another. Whatever has stunted the artists on the right, whatever has held them back, I’m not sure. I have a lot of hope that the future is bright for conservatives who are driven to create, partly because that’s who I am, and partly because I can see in my children a strong, creative drive towards the arts, and I want a future for them.
Reading @Rod Dreher‘s Substack this morning, he says this: “Maybe a useful way to think of it...is that Trump represents vitalism. He doesn’t sit around pondering things; he acts. Is vitalism conservative? In principle, no — it is modern, and anti-conservative. But what if a vitalist politician acts in service of goals that conservatives support? Do the conservative ends justify the un-conservative means?” And so I think of your article again (I've been recommending it like crazy) and ARC’s desire, for example, to highlight the arts (see my recent article on my experience there). I think something is going to get terribly lost in translation. As a non-conservative but maybe non-liberal, I really want to figure out a way to translate the artist’s…way? Position? Offering?…for these non-artists so we don’t get stuck. I want the “vitalism” to be oriented properly so we don’t get endless renditions of “YMCA” or cheap renditions of classical art & architecture. I fear that "golden age"="gold-encrusted toilets".
My husband Ben and I were talking this morning about the importance—in conversations about this "golden age"—of not dictating the value of one genre or school over another, and avoiding dogmatism among artists who are excited about it as a "return to all things traditional". My personal aversion to brutalist architecture, for example, is based on its tendency to dehumanize, to exclude the human orientation from the equation. Yes, I have this aversion, but it is possible that there is beautiful, human-ennobling brutalist architecture. It’s true.
Why do I stand before an epic war-battle painting, absolutely masterfully painted, a triumph of classical painting…and feel nothing…and when I stand before a Rothko, I feel enveloped in a spiritual space that brings me great consolation? Am I wrong to feel this way? I don’t believe so.
It’s going to be important in this conversation to avoid the bait of “conservative vs liberal” alignments, bc that’s just not what artists do when we’re making work in our truest selves. We carry something different than the policy wonks do, and I believe we need to be true to this. The freedom we have been craving under the last 10 years of absolutely suffocation in the worship of left-wing politics is NOT just a "return to tradition." We want standards of quality, yes, but also just some light and fresh air and the right to our own minds, unmediated by either tech or politics.
I feel instinctually that the thing we must "return" to is work that ennobles the human being: work that does not "deconstruct" humanity or treat us as transactional assets or inconveniences to Causes. That transcends style, genre, school...and 🤮 activism.