Be Still My Heart

Liberal institutions, and the power elite, from the media to museums to the universities, determine who is permitted to dominate these specialized fields. The wider society, conditioned to rely on the specialist- whether in finance, politics, or art- for its interpretation of reality, is fed approved assumptions. And this system is perfectly designed to reproduce itself. Universities, by demanding that professors attain doctorates, almost always written on narrow and obscure specializations approved by faculty committees, replenish their ranks with the timid and the mediocre.

The artist, like the specialist or the professor, is plugged into a system where he or she serves the interest and tastes of the power elite. The choice may be between high and low culture, but in each sphere members of the liberal class do not risk losing their prestige and employment by defying the structures of power. Playwrights end up writing inane television scripts. Graphic artists draw and animate for corporations. Actors pay the rent doing commercials and voiceovers. Filmmakers, editors, and writers sell themselves to corporate advertizing agencies. And those on the upper end of the cultural spectrum, the tenured professors and cultural critics, the lauded poets and art historians, speak and write only for one another like medieval theologians. Artistic expression, like scholarship, is sustained by a system of interlocking, exclusive guilds. And those who insist on remaining independent of these guilds, such as the documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman, are locked out. Those who write, think, paint, film, or sculpt in ways that defy the specialists or the demands of commercialized mass culture must break free from the instutitions run by the liberal class.