Editorial: Art and Politics

Why can't art and politics mix?

I would like all poets, musicians, composers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, writers, dramatists, and artists generally, to remind me again gently why it is not wise for art to become mixed up with politics. I could have sworn I knew — I thought it was something to do with the Young Irelanders movement and how they paralysed Irish music by utilising it towards political ends, or maybe that was the Gaelic League? Or does it have something to do with Yeats? You see, I read an article recently by a poet who said he was involved in a European association of poets, and one of the tenets of the organisation is that it doesn’t become involved in politics. Being the editor of a music journal, which I think has great potential, I obviously don’t want it to go down any sorry political road that has been tried and tested by many artists and people involved in the arts before. So I’m hoping they’ll be able to tell me how to keep this music journal clean and healthy.

But I shall be honest. I read about the anti-corporate eruption in Canada recently, and it gripped my imagination. I tried to deny it. I hummed and whistled and tried to keep it out of this editorial, but I can’t. I also keep coming across articles in the Irish newspapers detailing the inequality, the unhappiness, the selfishness and arrogance of modern Ireland, and I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t fire-up the people behind this journal. But I accept that we have started a music journal — just please tell me how to keep the politics out!

It’s got worse you see. A musician friend read my last editorial, which was overtly political, and now he’s doing it too. He wants to talk about Naomi Klein’s No Logo, about things like the branding of cultural space, and where music fits in to all of this. I fear we might not be musicians any more …

So let me speculate for a moment. If I don’t bring in political parties, am I okay then? What if I leave out the North, the Celtic Tiger and the anti-corporate movement, can I keep the shrinking of cultural space? Maybe I could wrap it all up in a ‘commoditisation of art’ piece of rhetoric, but everybody seems sort of tired of that old record. The part I feel most guilty about is that I had everybody thinking that this journal was ‘all about music’. How naive I was! Dear Irish artists, is that the kind of mistake that your wisdom tries to warn me against?

It’s got so squalid that my friend even suggested we start up an accompanying magazine for ‘political’ discourse, but we couldn’t help thinking that if we didn’t incorporate our love of music, then we’d probably get bored of it very soon. Oh dear, are we destined to have an agenda? Should we throw in our cards now and move to the other side?

I do realise that a connection with music and art is imbued with great passion, and you don’t want that getting into the wrong hands, perhaps seized upon by commercial forces and utilised to make attractive values that are actually anti-art, but hasn’t that infested the world entirely at this stage. Don’t tell me there is free space left. I simply don’t believe you. In fact, often it looks like a real commercial mess, with little space or time for any great or monumental artistic expression, save as something decorous that dandily chastises philistine values. I sort of expected you’d be in the thick of this fight. It’s getting quite dirty out here. I’m guessing by your silence that you’re not interested.

Dear artists, the people are going mad. A handful of hefty multinationals have taken away their only space and slapped on sponsorship and tokenism to the extent that they don’t think they can do without it at all. Good Friday was in fact a great day — for shopping. Their Sunday outings turn into walks through malls. I know you say this is nothing to do with you, but this is in the domain of the cultural space, which we musicians and artists have inhabited for thousands of years. It’s where we ply our craft. Shouldn’t we be doing something? Maybe try to shoulder ourselves in, dig in and reclaim some of that space. Or hasn’t it got that serious yet? Maybe you’d like to wait a bit longer. I’m sorry, but whatever your policy is, it’s not working.

I’m really racking my brains for reasons for all of this, because I so want to be one of you. I don’t want the JMI to have the bad name that so many past titles have, with their agendas, nationalism and provincialism. I know social activism isn’t everybody’s thing — I’ve certainly never tried it — but we really are going down the swannee here and we could do with your input. Yes, of course your art suggests all sorts of things to the imagination, but your work is being channelled away. We don’t command the space anymore. This is serious. It’s time to get your hands dirty.

So, you see, I shouldn’t have really said all that. But what am I supposed to do? All of these things seem very relevant to music, moreover, to the performance of music, which is its very essence. I think about these things when I perform. I try and weigh up spaces and be alert to how this or that space has been shaped before I get there. It’s never a very innocent arena.

Finally, on that topic of innocence, it occurs to me to add that the spate of ‘Old Ireland’ autobiographies and memoirs that came out in the past few years painted a world that, however dark, depressing or brutal, seemed at least innocent, there still being charm in their cultural environment, an undeniable substance to it all, whatever it was. There is little of such innocence today, and certainly little that is innocuous or uncalculated. ‘We were born with our eyes wide open,’ as David Gray says. There is a challenge to the musician in this, and that is why I am sceptical of the comfy consensus on the relationship between politics and art. So just tell me, is it my hang-up or yours?

P.S. I’m hoping that we can look forward to a good open debate on music education within the pages of the JMI, one that isn’t for once confined sparingly to the letters pages of the national newspapers. All contributions welcome.

Published on 1 May 2001

Toner Quinn is Editor of the Journal of Music. His new book, What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music, is available here. Toner will be giving a lecture exploring some of the ideas in the book on Saturday 11 May 2024 at 3pm at Farmleigh House in Dublin. For booking, visit https://bit.ly/3x2yCL8.

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