ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, August 2, 2007

Art should transcend partisan divisions, not fuel them
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

After the recent CNN/YouTube debate — which featured Democratic presidential
candidates answering questions from a snowman and critiquing each other's
wardrobes — a chorus of critics once again lamented the creeping influence of
entertainment in politics. The problem has been the subject of ample analysis
in recent months, but amid our collective hand-wringing we have ignored a more
pernicious problem: the creeping influence of politics on the arts and
entertainment.

Partisan brawls once confined to oped pages and political talk shows now
regularly spill into art galleries, amphitheaters and multiplexes. Examples
abound, from the public feud in country music between the Bush-bashing Dixie
Chicks and the Bush-backing Toby Keith to the proliferation of political art
exhibits and the spate of thinly veiled political allegories released by
Hollywood filmmakers in recent years.

Rockers now launch concert tours to promote presidential candidates while
independent film festivals such as Sundance open with fiery partisan speeches
and showcase advocacy films pushing one hot-button issue after another. Even
comic strip authors have hopped on the activist bandwagon: Last weekend's
comics featured politically charged critiques of everything from environmental
activism and wartime journalism to political fundraising and critics of a
former Supreme Court justice.

There is nothing new about political messages infiltrating the arts and
entertainment. For decades now, artists and critics have tended to equate a
politicized social conscience with artistic seriousness. What is striking about
today's politically charged movies, music lyrics and art exhibits is how
commonplace they have become — and how pointedly partisan.

Artists and entertainers no longer simply endorse candidates or champion
political causes in their free time. They write songs that bash specific
politicians, draft scripts to advance particular policies and proudly
characterize their art as a tool of political persuasion. After a relative lull
since the 1960s, the ranks of these entertainer-activists have exploded in
recent years.

Conservatives often bemoan the fact that so many of them lean left in their
political views. But the problem runs deeper than political imbalance. Our
nation's fierce partisan divide is poisoning one of the few realms of culture
that can help us bridge that divide: the world of art and entertainment.

In today's polarized climate, artists and entertainers can provide a reprieve
from partisan bickering and our scandal-driven, 24-hour news cycle. Authentic
art transcends politics not through escapism or sensationalism, but by inviting
us to suspend our preconceptions, enter into the experience of another and
consider universal themes from new perspectives.

Our superficial political culture discourages us from grappling with the
fundamental value conflicts at the root of our policy disputes. But art
illuminates the competing worldviews that drive these debates and opens an
avenue for genuine dialogue. Through story, song and sheer, transcendent
beauty, art expands our horizons and pushes us to look beyond mere political
solutions for answers to our deepest longings and most pressing problems. An
artist's transcendent vision reminds us that profound meaning lurks just
beneath the surface of ordinary life — and far from the noise of horse-race
politics and partisan feuds.

Author Thomas Merton once said that artists, like saints, are "in the world and
not of it. . . . The integrity of an artist," he said, "lifts a man above the
level of the world without delivering him from it."

Like prophets who have lost their voice, today's politicized artists and
entertainers echo the slogans of our fight-club political culture but fail to
rise above our claustrophobic political categories. In their desperation to be
politically relevant, they implicitly affirm the one lie against which great
artists always have rebelled: that art is only a means to an end, not an end in
itself.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.