What is provocative art in a hyper-politicized age?
asks The Remodern Review's
Richard Bledsoe (thanks to
Ed Driscoll).
It’s art that dares to express dissent from
the orthodoxy of the ruling establishment. And despite their best
efforts to camouflage the nature of their oppressive and destructive
grip on the culture, the establishment these days is a hive mind of
Progressive dogma.
In this era of integrated information, we
are witnessing the most concerted attack on freedom in world history.
The powerful are colluding to manipulate the powerless to act as the
shock troops to enforce the agenda of the New Aristocracy of the Well
Connected. From positions of power in government, administration,
academia, media, and the arts, they promote lynch mob tactics against
anyone who does not conform to their Orwellian programs of
doublethink,
thoughtcrimes, and
Two Minutes Hates.
The festering ambition in the corrupt hearts
of the elitists is unaccountable power for themselves; now they fancy
they have the technology to make their tyranny truly global in scale.
They like to proselytize about the direction of history, and appeal to
idealism in order to sucker the useful idiots they need to act as their
muscle. Yet in practice their proposed model will end up looking like
every other attempt since Marx: a small group of privileged thugs
standing on top of mass graves, while the enslaved populace toils away
in fear and hopelessness.
There’s nothing progressive about what the
Left proposes: it’s a regression to the same old feudalism that is as
old as mankind itself, tarted up with some buzzwords and hypocrisy. The
Gramsci long march through the institutions has been effective in degrading the culture to make a society ripe for totalitarianism.
We are on the edge now. All too soon, we
will either see their plot succeeded, or we will find out what happens
when their overreach crumbles, and their grand designs collapse under
the weight of hubris and backlash.
… The elitists have weaponized art into an assault on the achievements of
Western civilization, but they have nothing coherent, useful or enduring
to replace those achievements with; all they offer is their lust for
domination and self-aggrandizement. This makes their program a very
niche market.
So the answer is to bypass the filters of the establishment, and take the change directly to the people. In April, at
Lotus Contemporary Art of Phoenix, Arizona, a group show of citizen artists took a stand. This will hopefully be the first show of many.
Coordinated by Provocative Art 2016,
this exhibit brought together renowned artists from across the country,
including Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez, National Review cover artist Roman Genn, and controversial guerilla public artist Sabo.
