Reading through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “We Were Eight Years in Power,” I came across an incredible paragraph in which he describes the aesthetic he absorbed from Nas’s “One Love.” “Art was not an after-school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all its brutality and beauty, not in hopes of changing it but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie, to not be coopted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us.”
The first thing to unpack here is that Coates sees art as something “mean” and “selfish,” that is, something fundamentally personal and private. Art as a tool of the individual to save himself from the insanity of those around him.
And secondly, he sees good art as being itself a subversion of other art, namely the bad art of television, marketing, and the “epic” myth of innocence America tells itself. This strikes me as being a very distinctively contemporary view of art. More often in the past, it seems to me, the “enemy” of art, so to speak, was the banality of non-art, the meaninglessness of the day-to-day, boredom, confusion, forgetfulness. For example, think of a writer like Joyce for whom myths, marketing, all culture in general was material not to be subverted, but to be reimagined and thus reborn.
What other artists have seen art as Coates does? Have there been thinkers in all ages who thought of art, as Coates does, as something inherently subversive, or is this something truly new?
recycled paper clips 