Artists for friends

Should the artists you love love you back? I confess that this question never occurred to me when I was growing up or , as an adult, when I developed a taste for whatever art I happen to take pleasure in. As this question, or rather assertive expectation, hovers like a gibbering ghoul over all our aesthetic and pop-cultural conversations these days, and has done so in increasing emotional intensity with each passing year (or at least it seems so to me), I have found myself asking why it would never occur to me—apart from what I take to be later, more informed and reflective conviction.

I suppose much of the reason comes down to this: Growing up as a Christian in the U.S. means that if you like anything outside the sub-cultural bubble of kitsch and in-house “Christian” entertainment, you are forced to reckon pretty quickly with the fact that not only are the artists whose work you enjoy neither religious nor Christian; they are often actively hostile to the sort of Christian you are. More to the point, their words or images or themes make your faith and/or your community (i.e., your family) an object of critique, ridicule, or dismissal. Which means that, pretty quickly, you either accept this state of affairs and go on enjoying their work, or reject it in toto and return to the warm confines of the bubble. I opted for the former.

I think of Tool and Rage Against the Machine, two bands I adored in high school. I saw them live. I owned all their albums, including the Napster-sourced live and hard-to-find stuff. I learned their songs on guitar and bass. I was willy-nilly radicalized politically. (RATM was my first real introduction to leftist thought. They were the reason I was skeptical, as a self-involved suburban high schooler, of the Iraq war.) And guess what? I knew they hated my guts. They hated where I lived, where I went to church, my house, my friends, my parents, my beliefs—all of it. They told me so, in no uncertain terms. And what did I do? I kept on listening. Not only did I not let their contempt for much of what made me me determine whether or not I could enjoy their art. It actually proved a significant moment, or development, in my intellectual and theological formation. It snatched me out of the bubble and put me face to face with the voices of people who’d been harmed by religion, or who found it repulsive, or who thought it an emotional and political sedative, or who saw through the lies of hucksters and frauds. That was (and remains) an important education. For much of what they had to say was true; and even when it wasn’t, it was worth listening to.

I think also of Christopher Hitchens, whose writing I found myself falling in love with in my twenties. Not his politics—though the fact that I feel compelled to say that is itself an indictment of those readers who loved Hitch right up to the point when he crossed an invisible line, whereupon his writing somehow proved no longer good—but his prose. I still marvel at the man’s ability to write interesting sentences, combined with or underwritten by masterly knowledge of Anglophone literature and global politics and history. Seeing his nearly-posthumous bullet-stopper Arguably show up in the mail was Christmas come early: every essay a feast.

As you well know, Hitchens, too, hated my guts. He thought religion poisoned everything, specifically my religion: Israel and Jesus and Paul and Rome and all that. To which I thought: So be it. Who cares? I returned his hate with affection. I thought he was wrong, naturally, and that he ought to turn down the volume every once in a while. But if his hatred was earned—if he truly believed that what I believe is toxic to human flourishing—then he ought to have said so, and with all the passion he could muster. It would never occur to me to be angry at him, certainly not for saying what he judged to be true in the most compelling manner possible. I would, and still do, keep on reading and loving him back.

To be clear, I don’t mean to universalize my own experience. I would never prescribe reading or viewing or listening to artistic content filled with genuine hatred for oneself or one’s community. Nor would I suggest that one ought to do so on principle.

But the general point stands. Artists aren’t our friends. Good art is not art that affirms me or who I am; good art is not art that is made by people who affirm me or who I am. The art stands on its own. It is good or bad in itself, on its own terms. And if you, or I, find joy in it, see the truth in it, delight in its beauty or wit or pleasure, then each of us is free to ignore whatever wise or foolish beliefs its creators hold. The joke’s on them if they would withhold their work for only the “right” sort of people. But if we withhold it from ourselves, for no other reason than an arbitrary (and, given the implications, ultimately indefensible and self-defeating) sense that artists ought both to like us and to say so, then the joke’s on us.