Artists who appear to be conservative/right-wing at heart, yet are mostly lauded by liberals/leftists.

I don't see much right-wing propaganda in Straight Story's family issues, just primal yearning. Sex often leads to nothing but trouble in any world, especially in the cinny.

James Ellroy? (not that I've read him)

Lynch fumes: "People should be able to build what they want to build, when they want to build it, how they want to build it."

Says Powers of Lynch: "For all his dark, perverse imaginings, his social values are rooted in the sunlit credo of the American West: Don't tread on me. Nothing matters to him more than his freedom to do whatever he thinks up. I first saw this side of him one afternoon in 1989 when he began railing about the city government: It wouldn't let him put razor wire around his property to keep itinerants from cutting across his property."

Powers quotes Lynch as saying: "[T]his country's in pretty bad shape when human scum can walk across your lawn, and they put you in jail if you shoot 'em."

http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/

I don't know if he's afraid of "poor people," exactly, or at least not exclusively. Rich people in his movies tend to be pretty grotesque and decadent too. There is a sense of the wholesome middle class as a bulwark against moral decay on all sides, at least in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks (and The Straight Story, I guess). I don't know, though, I'm not sure as a whole that his stuff really tracks as classist. Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive don't really fit that mold. It's hard to pin him down ideologically, even given his ostensible Reagan Republicanism. It's all so Freudian and idiosyncratic. You can trace his neuroses to gender/race/class anxieties up to a point, but they're so specific and personal that they don't fit neat categories. ... (and obv. in twin peaks the middle-class bulwark is breached and the evil is actually right at its center. really, lynch's moral universe derives most directly from noir, which implicates everyone.)

ah, point taken.

Also, doesn't Vincent Gallo claim to be a conservative?

Vincent Gallo to jerk off, sell sperm [but not to darkies]

Just cos he was a Christian doesn't make him right wing. This was an artist who promoted the rights of Native Americans, opposed Vietnam and the Iraq war. Despite being "saved" he never became sanctimonious.

My contribution to the blacklist and I"m surprised it hasn't been said: Bob Dylan

I'm not convinced that Gallo believes any of the racialist nonsense that he says.

so? does that somehow make it better?

Maybe if Gallo had a bigger stage, where anyone but Vice fanboys and Chloe Sevigny gave a damn about his views, it would be a bigger deal. But he is, ultimately, a nobody.

NO FUCKING WAY was Johnny Cash conservative. He basically looked at Xtianity as a force for redemption and was the sole Xtian on the planet that I ever had any respect for.

Even in Curb Your Enthusiasm, there's an episode where he gets a new dog that barks at black people and causes him all manner of embarassment, and makes some remarks that have his status as "friend o' lesbians" retracted, all while wearing a bow tie which causes someone to call him "Tucker Carlson over there". There's also another episode where he's about to start making out with a gorgeous fellow co-star of The Producers but then notices a picture of George Bush on her dresser, asks her if she's a republican (she is), gets disgusted and has to leave.

This would be more interesting going the other way - supposedly right-wing (but not really) artists that get shunned by leftists. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Lynrd Skynrd.

thumbs up to milo re salvador dali (who vladimir nabokov once called
"the spanish norman rockwell" [though mr. rockwell himself was somewhat left-leaning]).

i stand corrected. marinetti didn't invade fiume, tho'.

others: john ford (or at least certain french lefty film-lovers did). lee ving (alex in nyc to thread!) morrissey.

50 Cent

Are you talking about Johnny Cash? And did you know that Tucker Carlson was once a contributing editor to the right-wing Arkansas Democrat-Gazette?

We need more gun-toting, nasty scotch loving Democrats--the image of the "pansy liberal" is an understimated in why the vote goes to the Elephants and not the Donkeys in the South.

We get it, you don't like the show.

Yes - I think there's a difference between conservative and right wing.

I see conservative as a kind of harking back to the past, with a strong distaste for the present. Often combined with a distrust of government in general, and a wish to restrict government intervention of all kinds.

I think Robert Crumb and William Burroughs both fit into this category.

More consistently what you see is that the "conservative" leanings of artists lauded by "the left" boils down to wanting to live in the woods and own guns and the rest of the world can fuck right off. Which I often think sounds like a pretty attractive option myself.

I'm wondering if aestheticism unites left and right the same way libertarianism does. In other words, we need a three-dimensional model which includes dimensions like libertarianism and aestheticism as well as just left and right.

I no longer write for Vice, and it's funny that what separated us in the end was an aesthetic disagreement; I wanted to attack skull imagery in a piece, and they didn't want to. Now, is it left wing or right wing to wear a skull t-shirt or have a skull tattoo? It could be either, but it's offensive to my particular aesthetic.

(Tender-minded, childlike, optimistic, wholesome, healthy, Eros, no skulls, believe people, left to their own devices, are basically good) v (Tough-minded, adult, pessimistic, sleazy, destructive, Thanatos, skulls, believe people, left to their own devices, are basically bad)

Now, to me there is a certain correlation between tender-mindedness and liberal-left politics, and between tough-minded "realism" and the right, but it's not a hard-and-fast one. There are tender-minded conservatives (David Cameron?) and tough-minded leftists (Brecht?).

ech, not so much.

i am glad that you allowed for exceptions to the general rule. i would argue that american liberalism was most effective when it was MORE tough-minded -- folks like FDR, LBJ, MLK, RFK, and countless labor leaders weren't pushovers or saps. i would even go so far as to say as liberalism grew MORE soft-minded, it declined in both influence and electibility.

It's not just this board. I mean, what does "conservative" even mean anymore? It's awfully goddamn hard to tell. Liberalism has been debased as a label too, but at least I still feel like I have a general idea what it means.

"Cameron would lead a moderately unenlightened businessman’s government; Brown a moderately enlightened businessman’s government. The difference between the two, while a bit more than wafer thin, will hardly register on any political scale... Does it matter, indeed, whether there is a Conservative or a Labour government? At the moment, not much... the two major parties fundamentally share the same ideology."

Alfred, were Eliot and Bresson conservative or just Catholic?

NO FUCKING WAY was Johnny Cash conservative

This is a lot more complicated than many late-career fans believe, judging by my riffling through the autobiography and the 8 hours of TV stuff (especially from the '60s and '70s) I saw last year. He was certainly a flag-waver in a way contemporary young libs tend to snort at, and I don't think he ever urged the US to unconditionally pull out of Vietnam. In the book I recall him writing that he liked Reagan and Clinton personally, and didn't vote for either of them.

"I don't want the Thatcher years back, but I don't want the Brown-Prescott years either.I am prepared to give David Cameron his chance - even though he is a Tory."

Conservative means "not liberal" and "far-right/extreme conservative" means "Really-not-liberal". So you've got free-market libertarianism and fascism sharing a room along with monarchy and some other junk that never shared a common thread outside of being outside the mainstream liberal-left, hence the confusion.

Well, he's conservative in some senses, mostly aesthetically, but his politics and lyrics seem pretty explicitly left-wing, even socialist on most issues. A little dubious on race and immigration, yes, if that's what you're talking about.

Conservative means "not liberal" and "far-right/extreme conservative" means "Really-not-liberal". So you've got free-market libertarianism and fascism sharing a room along with monarchy and some other junk that never shared a common thread outside of being outside the mainstream liberal-left, hence the confusion.

But I could say something similar from the other side: Stalin and anarchist communes are all lumped together along with Greenpeace and Swedish social democracy and some other junk that never shared any real common thread outside of being outside the mainstream neocon-right. (And how can the mainstream be liberal-left when GEORGE W. BUSH IS PRESIDENT?)

Anyway, wasn't James Joyce somewhat right-wing? Is he lauded by liberals and leftists?

Is PJ O'Rourke really lauded by leftists? Found him amusing in high school myself.

There's also the question of distinguishing between political rhetoric and reality. In the US, whatever people think, the Democrats are the party that have been shown to benefit business the most (measured by stock exchange performance) and the Republicans expand government and the public sector the most (mainly with war and security expenditure).

Unlike Eliot, who described himself as Anglo-Catholic (High Church of England, basically: the ultra-Conservative wing of the Church) and a Monarchist (and he wasn't talking Constitutional Monarchy there), and published lines that it's all but impossible to argue aren't anti-Semitic.

More consistently what you see is that the "conservative" leanings of artists lauded by "the left" boils down to wanting to live in the woods and own guns and the rest of the world can fuck right off.

My sense is the conservative thing about some artists that bothers me is this urge to fit everything into neat little boxes, this control freak Kubrick style.

whereas out-of-control has dwarves, red-curtained rooms, hoodlums and hooligans, owls... you know the drill.

Yeah. this is incredibly irritating. Momus, did you put that essay on skulls & all things goth on your blog? I could swear I read it there & thought, huh, I completely agree.

Bresson = very Catholic.

So OTM

yeah i think i said something about transcendence through suffering.

What? What evidence are you using for either? I can see Bush and Hoover expanding government and Reagan certainly got more government money to spend than ever before but I still don't see how you came to either conclusion. Are you assuming FDR was just riding Hoover's policy on the New Deal?

Oh, and I to answer the thread directly I think any right-wing person in the arts who gets lauded. Has there ever been a "critically acclaimed" art or artist who was liked exlusively by "the right"? No. If that were the case they wouldn't be critically acclaimed, right?

But the Republicans do get credit for expaning the government / public sector.

ha. hahaha.

I have a gay friend that insists that Eliot was "one of the boys." He reads "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as the narrative of repressed gay man. While I can definitely see such a reading being justified, I'm not sure if there is enough evidence to say he was. (The other evidence I've heard to support this are the allusions to homoerotic passages in Dante that Eliot uses). What do you all think of this.

It's true that Eliot had gay/bisexual left-leaning friends (ie. Virginia Woolf), so I guess some liberals like him. I like him.

yeah, it's for these reasons we have the useful 'things are beyond left and right' cliche.

i mean of course catholics are conservative, in their sexual politics and more often than not in their politics more broadly. their whole schtick is against rational secularism (ie the historical left, inheritor of the french revolution).

tuomas' point re the lutherans is interesting -- you would imagine that the lutherans would have no time at all for the state, would you not?

I don't think expanding the military is an inherently liberal/left principle! Liberal/left doesn't mean that you want big government in every sector regardless of what it does (otherwise fascists would be the ultimate leftists). Nor does it prove that Democrats are further right than Republicans just because the economy does better under them! If anything, it could seem to suggest that (slightly) liberal policies actually work economically.

john currin.

(perfect neo-con, a la adam curtis "power of nightmares" defn.)

I was referring the "mainstream liberal-left". Not the mainstream as a liberal place necessarily.

The "stock markets perform better under Democrats" thing is documented here (CNN) and here (New York Times).

Wow, that's really quite an amazing study. One thing I have with it is if it takes into account who has control of Congress at the time. Would Reagan get credit for the 1980s despite Democrats being in control of the houses, etc?

that's a bit of a red herring, considering Reagan's economic policies were enthusiastically backed (at least in the first term) by a cooperative majority of "Reagan Democrats" and Republicans (the raising of the nat'l debt ceiling, etc.)

so you could really put any conservative OR right-wing artist in here and it wd work

are often too busy doing that kind of stuff to make any money and tend to favour a status ladder in which cleverness about arty things counts for more and money counts for less

this usually counts as being left/liberal although whether it should is a different matter

Frank Miller used to be like this, but I'm pretty sure most of his leftist fans have abandoned him by now.

That reminds me - I'd like to reread those Martha Washington books again at some point. What was the deal with those?

Billy Corgan?

the answer to this is miranda lambert

Mort Walker!

FP'd you for Dik Browne erasure

Jorge Luis Borges is one that immediately comes to mind, though his politics mostly aren't evident in his writing. I can't imagine most conservatives have read him, let alone heard of him.

The above stuff about Lynch from 2006 is very interesting in the light of 2020, particularly the stuff equating "family values" with conservatism. Though cons always paid lip-service to such values, I can think of few things more corrosive to family values than capitalism.

shows how the perception right and left has changed so significantly the last 10 years ( also to the point where I'm wondering whether Bill Hicks isn't creeping closer to a valid answer here)

Bill Hicks would have been a Berniebro.

Norm Macdonald seems to be the most obvious answer to this thread right now

The above stuff about Lynch from 2006 is very interesting in the light of 2020, particularly the stuff equating "family values" with conservatism. Though cons always paid lip-service to such values, I can think of few things more corrosive to family values than capitalism.

Lynch is so into families that he's had four of them

(and started at least two of those by cheating on then ghosting a previous partner or wife aiui)

Damn, I didn't know that. X reference with the "separating the art from the artist" thread.

Bill Hicks would have been a Berniebro.

I'd suggest H.L. Mencken, even though his politics were all over the place by today's definitions. "At heart" he seems conservative.

and unless I’m misremembering p gd racist

you're not misremembering

Nah he’d be a corona truther.

I don't know how the guy who talked like this gets lumped into the reactionary bin -" Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace."