jane dark's sugarhigh!

Twizzler/The Heart of the Matter

Something mysterious hovers at the edge of the perverse, recursive debate which has re-appeared this time regarding the grotesque political provocations of one Linda Ronstadt (I mean, aside from the fact that the casino spokesperson is named Sarah Gorgon).

The glaring absurdity is the race to the bottom of the abstraction pool: the presumption on both sides that this somehow is an opportunity to discuss free speech, and the place of political opinion in art, as general topics. Is is not in fact a good opportunity to stage such debates, because what happened in Vegas wasn't about these matters. It wasn't general or abstract. It was particularly about George W. Bush and Michael Moore and the Presidential race. The audience members who tore down posters, and the casino that pandered to them, have no problem at all with "art" or "politics" or their intersection. They just don't want to deal with the fact that the children of the cities whose suburbs they inhabit are prancing around some country, murdering other children and sometimes being murdered in return, and that this might be a problem. There was no effort to "censor" Linda Ronstadt for offering up political rhetoric; there was an attempt to punish her for a specific opinion, and the fact that she said it in a speaking voice.

That last is the actual mystery. I suspect that had she sung "Masters of War" or "Stand Down Margaret," vocalizing notes in the Western scale as she pronounced the words, while the band manipulated their musical apparatus as bands tend to do, no one would have said boo. Which is to say, the vast majority of audiences -- the ones that go to concerts in Vegas, dinner theater in London, emo at Warped, and movies at the Carlyle -- recognize that art is, sigh, not actually much of a political risk. That, simply by agreeing to appear as "art," political speech becomes for the most part agreeable.

This is not to say that "art" has never caused any political problems, in the long or short term. This is to suggest that the general understanding of art and politics is already settled, and that to debate it is to miss the point of immediate social reality. And meanwhile, artists who want to kick up a fuss better spend a real hard time figuring out how to escape the trap, or it's just emo.