[SEQ RERUN] Politics and Awful Art

MinibearRex

Today's post, Politics and Awful Art was originally published on 20 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When producing art that has some sort of political purpose behind it (like persuading people, or conveying a message), don't forget to actually make it art. It can't just be politics.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Litany Against Gurus, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Politics and Awful Art was originally published on 20 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When producing art that has some sort of political purpose behind it (like persuading people, or conveying a message), don't forget to actually make it art. It can't just be politics.

Huh. The Cathedral of Light actually looks friggin' awesome, which is really frustrating.

which is really frustrating

Why? Most of the art and even much of the science you probably find awesome was produced by cultures, individuals and organizations with whom you probably have profound moral and ethical disagreements.

If you can't enjoy The Cathedral of Lights, how can you enjoy a real cathedral built in say the 16th century? How can you find something like the Colosseum grand for example without being similarly conflicted? Or are you?

6Costanza15y

I agree! It's frustrating because the bad guys thought of it (or at least executed it) first, and so a brilliant new effect had its debut in the service of a monstrous evil philosophy. But sometimes evil people are great artists. George Orwell argued this point in his essay Benefit of Clergy. The title refers to an old English legal rule that clergymen, by virtue of their status, could be excused of punishment for crimes that would have an ordinary layman hanged.* Orwell suggested that some people in the modern day (circa 1944) were inclined to forgive the manifest moral failings of any obviously exceptional artist, and another group was inclined to say that no artist who had deep moral failings could possibly be skilled, let alone exceptional. Orwell rejected both these views. He compared the aesthetic skill of an artist to the effectiveness of a wall in standing up: [...] Lots more could be said about this essay, but suffice it now to say that skillful wall building matters, and skillful art matters in the marketplace of ideas. This particular sequence in the top level post hits home with me personally. When I was a young boy, the first thing that made me question the church in which I had been raised was the relentlessly crappy church music. It sucked, and sucked so hard, at least in my opinion which has not changed in several decades. My child self asked: if church was as important as all these adults claimed, in their slightly bored way, why were the songs worse than the theme songs from cartoons on television, and even worse than the jingles played on commercials on kids' TV? I'm reminded of Eliezer's comment about an artist at a singularity summit, in which she was effectively told: we don't really want your participation. To a point. Someone whose life has been entirely devoted to creating images or music or any other kind of art is not necessarily equipped to engineer a game of computer tic-tac-toe, let alone a friendly artificial intelligence. But i

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