I have been thinking about it, and it’s been rumbling in my mind, fingers, soul, you name it, every time I sit down to write about art right now. It’s self-consciousness, in a way. I look around at the time we live in, and I can’t help to think what Isherwood would have written, what Hemingway would have said, what Baldwin’s wisdom would have responded to these moments of social turmoil. Political turmoil. The point is, I’m finding it hard to write about art because I am thinking about how the past wrote about art in times of upheaval and the rise of Fascism and it’s hard not to repeat what has already been said. The blueprint is there. But this is different. This is social media. This is full on 1984 meets Brave New World types of social decay and reformation of order (there I go, again, quoting the past). We have toys and tyranny at every inch of our grasp, literally 24 hours a day. So…, how do you write about art right now? If I find it difficult, surely some peers also find it hard?
I had a long conversation with veteran war reporter and journalist, Joanne Levine, from her home in Washington, DC, and asked her, in all her experience, if she ever found times where writing in the moment almost felt too small or not up to the task. I told her that I honestly didn’t think fascism would come so fast, as in you see it creep toward you but all of sudden it’s literally drowning the very fabric of society in a blink of an eye. I had always envisioned myself as writing Pulitzer Prize essays of resistance and critical theory when the foot soldiers eventually came to our city streets, and here I am finding it hard to even write about art. The vision of myself in an alternate universe was better than this parallel reality.
“Writing about art in this fraught moment is hard, if not impossible,” Levine wrote me after considering the question. “As citizens we have been watching our democracy hang in the balance and falter as ICE gunned down two Americans who exercised their constitutional right to protest. But however hard this is the moment to speak out. For big names in music like Bruce Springsteen that means writing and releasing a song about Minneapolis. For Lady Gaga it means a recrafted rendition of Mr Rogers quaint ditty ‘Won’t you be my neighbor.’
“Dissent has always found a safe harbor in art. The challenge is to keep writing, singing, and painting. Voices must not be silenced.” —Evan Pricco
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