Dubya’s reign is nearly over. What impact did he have on the artistic life of his country? Here 12 prominent Americans give their verdict.
Paul Auster: Author
I’m hard-pressed to think of a single thing the Bush administration has done to promote the arts. Things have gone on as before: novelists are writing books, people read them or don’t read them, movies are being made and people go or don’t go, artists are painting pictures, people are making music. I don’t see that the Bush people have affected the cultural landscape that much.
These past eight years have been about the worst that I can imagine. For the first time as a writer I’ve addressed, here and there, the situation that we’re living through. I’d never done that before and I guess because I’ve been so alarmed, so distraught, the pressure of this unhappiness has spilled over into my work at times.
If McCain wins, I feel like going into a cellar for the next four years or going out in the streets every day and screaming. Obama, if he does win, is going to have so many problems to deal with that the most one could hope for would be to undo some of the damage. Most artists seem to be for Obama. In fact, I haven’t met a single one who is for McCain, so our spirits would be lifted. The problems in the country will remain as serious as ever.
Art isn’t journalism. Some of the greatest historical novels were written long after the events discussed in the book. You think of War and Peace, written in 1870 about things that happened in 1812. I think there’s this confusion in the minds of the public that artists are supposed to respond immediately to things that are going on. We’ve been living through a new era. Everyone knows the world has changed, but exactly where the story is taking us is unclear right now and until it plays out further I don’t know if anyone has a clear vision of what’s happening.
Joyce Carol Oates: Writer
The “cultural legacy of George W Bush” would seem to be the punchline of a cruel joke, if there could be anything remotely funny about the Bush administration. (There isn’t: nothing funny and nothing of a legacy.) But the national book festival, hosted each September by former librarian Laura Bush on the Mall in Washington is a truly valuable cultural event, which we can hope that the wife of George W’s successor will wish to continue.
The cultural life of the United States is a thing quite apart from the federal government. It can flourish, as in the Johnson-Nixon eras, as counter-culture; in times of political debasement, art can be idealistic and ahistorical. Most artists live through a sequence of administrations, and their art evolves in ways too individual to be related to larger generic forces.
The cultural life of the US would be relatively unchanged if McCain wins, since he is a variant of Bush. If Obama wins, very likely there would be an efflorescence of a kind, perhaps most evident in the more public art forms – dance, music, theatre.
We can hope!
Gore Vidal: Writer
Although all politicians tell lies, Bush has gone right round the bend as a liar and he’ll be remembered for a great many of the lies, starting with weapons of mass destruction and going on and on. That’s the only legacy. Oliver Stone, I gather, is doing father-and-son stories. I’m very fond of Oliver, but you don’t need Freud when you’re dealing with Caligula.
One of the problems is that journalists think this is just a familiar phenomenon, this administration. It isn’t – there isn’t anything like it. It doesn’t bode well for anything at all – it’s just there. Culture goes on. People go on writing novels even though the general public doesn’t want to read them. I think the plucky few will continue and to predict what the next wrinkle will be is not very useful.
We have a president who cannot read. He’s dyslexic, as was his father before him. It must have an effect. I watch a good deal of television because of the elections. The professional television people, all of them graduates of our finest universities, can’t use proper English. We are losing the language, I suppose.
Art is always needed in a country that doesn’t much like it. Performance is all anybody cares about.
Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky
Under Reagan and Thatcher you had the rise of an internationalist view of music, especially with punk, reggae and dub. The Bush administration has left a legacy of numbness – what do you rebel against when, essentially, the establishment just doesn’t care what you think?
Usually when you have a right-wing lunatic such as Nixon, or more cynical regimes such as Reagan or Bush I’s administration, there’s a counterpoint. What ended up happening with Bush II is that the counterculture response became incoherent.
The “culture-entertainment” industry is different now. They realise that the idea of rebellion can be made into an echo chamber and sold back to you. We have rebellion on the radio, songs that are anti-establishment, “mavericks” for president, but on the other hand you have the Dixie Chicks and the reaction when they said stuff against the war. You can see that there’s still a tremendous reactionary culture in the US.
The meta-narrative is that anything goes: Britney Spears giving herself a haircut or the “hyper-realism” of the execution of Saddam Hussein spreading like video wildfire on people’s cellphones. It’s incoherence – montaged and edited à la Oliver Stone. Is the president a mirror that speaks to you? I don’t think so.
Elizabeth LeCompte: Director
He has fostered the rise of political satire as an art form again. It hasn’t been very strong for the past 30 years or so and I think television programmes such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park and Lil’ Bush are all political works of art. Without the Bush administration I don’t think satire would have been as strong. It revived irony.
Theatre in the US is in decline, however. A lot of the people who would have been writing for the theatre 100 years ago are now writing in television. In the US all art is denigrated, basically, with the possible exception of music. Written and spoken arts aren’t taken seriously here, and I don’t think they’ve ever been.
People are starting to view politics as entertainment much more. That’s why the number of people voting is up. YouTube has made politicians entertainers. With satire there’s an incredibly powerful challenging of the powers that are, which I think is healthy. There’s also a trivialising effect at the same time. But it is a change, because young people are going to be involved in politics in a way that they haven’t been before.
When Obama had trouble, before he beat Hillary, they began to make fun of him as a pompous teacher, so let’s see. I think it’ll be interesting. I just know that for me, under the Bush administration, things such as The Daily Show and South Park will be remembered as real satire, not just parody and caricature.
Edward Albee: Playwright
What cultural legacy? There is no cultural legacy. We have an administration of criminality, complicity and incompetence but no cultural legacy whatever from those eight years. It doesn’t seem to have produced the kind of rage that I would have expected it to. It shows me that we have a far more passive and ignorant society than I thought we had.
The only value the arts have is commercial. I have found over the past eight years that commerce has taken over the arts in the United States.
I don’t think that the Republican administration could have got away with everything that it did had it not had a complacent and compliant society. That troubles me a lot. It tells me sad things about the US now. The only art that is allowed any great exposure is commercial art that is not going to rock the boat. I always have hope. Somebody asked Beckett once why he writes if he’s such a pessimist. He said: “If I were a pessimist I wouldn’t write.” I’m something of an optimist. I hope that we’re capable of getting back on the right track and continuing our peaceful social revolution.
Alex Gibney: Film director
I think the Bush administration did its best to create a vast wasteland. At the same time, because of the perfidy and corruption and utter lawlessness, it created an interesting backlash of politically orientated materials that were inspiring. Unintentionally, the administration provoked a lot of political art that I think was very valuable.
It contributed to an extraordinary flowering of political documentaries – and not necessarily pure anti-Bush ones. The administration provoked a thoughtfulness, both in aesthetic terms and in terms of political thinking, that expressed itself in documentaries in an exciting way. Iraq in Fragments, for instance, was a beautiful film – not overtly political but political in a deeper sense.
I was associated with a global series called Why Democracy?, in which filmmakers from all over the world looked at democracy at a time when Bush was trying to “make the world safe for democracy” – or to pulverise the world to accept his version of it. They were very interesting, perceptive and valuable. So the rise of new documentary in the age of Bush has been a great contribution, if unintended.
I think under a McCain administration you’d see a renewed sense of opposition. The cultural world may get even wilder. Under an Obama administration it’ll be interesting to see what happens. My fear about Obama is that he’s motivated to sweep a lot of stuff under the rug, about his own administration and its ties to high-powered financial interests. I’m getting ready to start looking at stuff and holding people to account.
I was joking with a friend of mine, Eugene Jarecki, who made Why We Fight, about how we’d better be honing our skills as the directors of romantic comedies, because without the Bush administration, what are political filmmakers going to do? We’ll all be out of work. So please, McCain, win!
Lionel Shriver: Author
As Oliver Stone’s film illustrates, W has been a great inspiration, a beacon on the hill, if you will, for artists in every field. Although perhaps not the kind of inspiration that the president would have wished.
Among many other works, Michael Moore’s mocking Fahrenheit 9/11, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Brian Haw’s Iraq-protest-turned-Turner-prize-winner-turned-West-End-play (The State We’re In) and David Hare’s Stuff Happens all have a notoriously incompetent American president to thank for their success. Bush’s inability to put a sentence together without repeating the same word five times and chronic mispronunciation of “nucular” have provided a feast for comics all over the world.
So the Bush years have been great for the arts, restoring a collusive, adversarial climate last seen circa 1968. Hate figures are far more motivating than heroes, and W has graciously provided the collectively left-wing artistic community with an embarrassment of riches. In fact, the biggest problem with the Bush era’s artistic legacy is that this widely despised president has tended to inspire polemics and agitprop. Many novels, films, plays and artworks from the past eight years have been spitting with indignation, painfully obvious in their political intent, sledgehammer subtle in their execution and clubby – because most of these works are preaching to the converted. Thus W might have bequeathed a whack of subject matter, but whether any of this stuff will be of enduring value is open to question. You have to ask yourself whether the diatribes denouncing Bush in a novel, such as JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (a book trying enough when it was published in 2007), will hold the faintest interest after January 2009.
And here’s the really bad news: Obama could be terrible for the arts. Why, when there’s barely an artist in the States who doesn’t support him? Art thrives on resistance. There’s nothing more arid, more enervating, more stultifying or more utterly uninspiring than getting your way.
Trisha Brown: Choreographer
I was given a list of people in Congress who might be open to talking about the arts. One senator asked me: “Is this like that woman who does dance?” turned to an assistant and said: “Who was that person?” He meant Martha Graham. The discussion was not bitter whatsoever, but it was frightening because I learned that these people are not thinking at all about the arts.
One Congressman said to me: “Well, is Joe Six-Pack gonna really be interested in this?” I said, well, we certainly have a country brimful of great artists and maybe Joe Six-Pack has a few of kids in the house and they might be interested in music, or painting, or dance. That was the most I could move him without getting into combat.
I
was lobbying, trying to bring them information. The other person who’s memorable from that excursion asked: “Do you know who I think is the greatest artist?”, so I said, “No, I don’t know”, and he said, “God”. I went home like a whipped puppy. I saw that there was no thought about it. My heart was broken.
I thought young artists would go to bat sooner. There are some people who are dedicated to responding to political issues and many who are not.
If you’re a painter or a sculptor, there’s money. If you’re in dance, there’s very little for independent artists. It’s very discouraging. I was so in love with art-making – but I’m tired of the suppression of the arts and I’ve shifted into other disciplines to find vitality and exchange.
David Simon: Writer/producer
Enron, Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans, Wall Street. An untenable drug war. A non-existent energy policy. An obliviousness to climate change. An unwillingness to recognise our problems, much less begin the hard work of solving them. Incompetence – rank incompetence – has become the American standard. We are no longer a competent, responsible nation state. America. The can’t-do superpower. Quite a legacy. Mr Bush is a remarkable man.
Naomi Wolf: Author
Bush’s cultural legacy? It’s disturbing that my initial response is to draw a blank. But it’s a sign of the fact that the past eight years have simply pushed the arts to an underground place. It’s not just that [Bush] didn’t fund the arts or invite artists to the White House; it’s not just that he doesn’t read poetry, doesn’t read books: there’s something about the brute force of this administration, and the fetishisation of brute force by this administration, which literally stands in opposition to civilisation and the arts.
I’ve done a lot of work on Germany from the Weimar period to the late Thirties. There was a similar hostility then to the cosmopolitan, the urbanite, the avant-garde, to any originality in art. Some of the most interesting visual artists we’ve seen in recent times, for example, were working behind the Iron Curtain and, of course, they had to work allegorically.
Much of the protest work I’ve seen [in the US] has been bad, pedantic, heavy-handed. I’ve seen so many bad monologues about the Iraq war, so many dreadful photomontages. I think it’s because Americans don’t quite understand repression yet. They’re not yet understanding the nature of the force that has come down on them, by drawing on their subconscious, by expressing themselves in an allegorical way. And I think artists in America are scared. Respected journalists are being arrested. Film documenting the Republican national congress has been destroyed. Artists are next on the list after journalists. So if, God forbid, there’s a McCain/Palin presidency we’ll see a crackdown of the police state, there’s no doubt.
I’m really quite ashamed of the American people – and, of course, I include myself in this. We saw what was happening and we kept right on internet shopping. All these writers and artists, good people, have just looked around and quietly aligned themselves. Novelists have been really silent. Usually writers are at the forefront of denouncing a regime: look at Vaclav Havel. Here people have complained a lot, but in terms of organising a vanguard of resistance, of people getting out there and saying this is not the American way … Where is the Arthur Miller of this generation? Who is out front, somewhere visible and tricky and scary?
Daniel Libeskind: Architect
How can you even begin to speak of a cultural legacy? It’s been wholly negative. Culture’s a dirty word to these people, like “liberal” or “literate”. We’ve experienced a complete bankruptcy of the culture of ideas over the past eight years. The intellect has been denigrated. Deep cuts have been made in education and in investment in cultural institutions.
At Ground Zero we’re not sure if the performing arts centre planned will ever happen. This was a key part of the masterplan, but all that’s mattered in the world of Bush is the workings, and failures, of the market economy. So, Ground Zero could yet end up, unless we get a sympathetic new president, as a purely commercial venture rather than as a springboard for American culture.
It’s hard to believe Bush, a man who’s proud not to read books and who makes fun of words longer than one syllable, has been the inheritor of the mantle of the Founding Fathers, or of Woodrow Wilson, FDR or even Bill Clinton. These people believed in the value of American culture being seen as an inspiring and civilising force around the world. Jefferson was a fine architect. All Bush has offered the world is military force. This is still a great country, but Bush and Cheney have ensured that only the negative side of US culture has spread around the world. —