The other night I stopped by the Strathmore Center, a beautiful arts Mecca and concert hall in Maryland. I was picking tickets for a concert by the Norwegian jazz pianist Tord Gustavsen.
At around the same moment, Megyn Kelly was telling the world that Mark Levin has a “micropenis.” Kelly’s feuded with Levin for months about the war in Iran. The usual suspects are all involved: Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Jack Smith, Dave Rubin, Laura Loomer. Everyone’s yelling at each other. No one’s creating anything new and interesting.
So much for conservatives changing the culture. Despite their ascendancy during the Trump era, despite vast wealth, despite constant complaints, conservatives have never managed to make a halfway decent work of art. They don’t hire and mentor fresh young talent, they hire a mental patient with an atomic mouth like Candace Owens. How did that work out?
Recently right-wing favorite Brett Cooper was profiled in a lengthy piece in The New York Times. Once a conservative star at the Daily Wire, Cooper now works for Fox News. She’ll do whatever other conservative on TV and social media do—sit behind a microphone and react to liberalism. From the Times:
“On YouTube, where nearly 1.6 million people subscribe to ‘The Brett Cooper Show,’ she publishes twice-weekly monologues about celebrity and trending news with a conservative bent. She uses headlines about stars like Katy Perry or Simone Biles to argue against feminism and abortion rights, or the ‘trans craze with young people.’ Ms. Cooper, whom Fox News signed in late June, represents a new evolution of Republican commentators: an entertainer playing by the internet’s rules, rather than the established customs of right-wing media. Her speech is quick and jocular, like a red-state mash-up of BuzzFeed and ‘Gilmore Girls.’”
What Brett Cooper won’t be doing is writing books, editing magazines or making music or movies. Like most on the right, she won’t create. She’ll react. Just like everyone else.
Conservatives haven’t had the guts to do something creative for decades. On the International Movie Database list of the “50 Best Conservative Movies,” the most recent film, Juno, came out in 2007—almost 20 years ago. Other films on the list are brilliant but most are more than two decades old: The Incredibles, Metropolitan, The Lives of Others.
The right mocks Lena Dunham, but what she accomplished, not only with Girls but also with her film Tiny Furniture and the book Not That Kind of Girl, require remarkable work, skill and dedication—and imaginative shoots and locations.
Over the last century, beginning with movies, jazz and literature, liberals have been the great artistic visionaries. They defended James Joyce. They founded magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and directed Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. And Lena Dunham was 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate her and the film. Then shut up and make a better one.
Wealthy people like Ben Shapiro won’t even fund the arts that could change the culture. Writing for Commentary, social historian Fred Siegel once explored how the American masses embraced the art in the 1950s even as philanthropists and gatekeepers were offering the best of Western culture. Americans at the time, wrote Siegel, “were sampling the greatest works of Western civilization for the first time.” The book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America revealed that “twenty years ago, you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York. Today we sell Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities.” There was a 250 percent growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955.
In 1955, writes Siegel, “15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games. 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.”
Siegel notes there were gatekeepers to get this great art to the people: “NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million viewers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours.” Siegel observes that “on March 16, 1956, a Sunday chosen at random,” the viewer could have seen a discussion of the life and times of Toulouse-Lautrec by three prominent art critics, an interview with theologian Paul Tillich, an adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Hook, a documentary on mental illness with Dr. William Menninger, and a 90-minute performance of The Taming of the Shrew. Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” a National Book Award winner, sold a million copies in paperback in the early-1950s.
John F. Kennedy supported the arts. “The life of the arts,” he said, “far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.”
I’ll never tolerate the American left, a Stasi that tried to kill me, but I’m increasingly alienated from the right. They do nothing to promote culture, and the culture they try to create is crap. When I go to concerts at the Strathmore Center, like the upcoming recital by Tord Gustavsen, before the show I take a walk to the gazebo near the concept hall. From there I can see the cupola of Boland Hall at Georgetown Prep, the Jesuit high school I attended in the 1980s. I have thoughts about God and religion, but I also feel suffused with the arts I learned there that changed my life. Shakespeare. J.D. Salinger. John Coltrane. The Moody Blues. Tolkien. T.S. Eliot. Flannery O’Connor. Thomas Merton. Bob Dylan. Jimi Hendrix. The Cars. On the Waterfront.
One person I admired back then was Alec Baldwin. Baldwin is a crazed, hectoring liberal. He’s also a great actor. I briefly intersected with Baldwin once, when he admired some short films I made and expressed interest in working together. Baldwin’s autobiography Nevertheless reveals a working-class Catholic kid from Long Island went to acting school and, unlike Brett Cooper, didn’t drop out. Cooper’s career won’t ever match Baldwin’s two minutes of screen time in Glengarry Glen Ross, where he plays the ferocious motivational salesman. To me his words have always applied to conservatives that I’ve tried to convince to stop biting and actually do the work of creating something beautiful and original. “They’re out there waiting to give you their money,” Baldwin says in Glengarry Glen Ross. "Are you man enough to take it?”
