They Don't Have WiFi In This Coffee Shop, Do They?

Moving into a new community, even for a short time, requires adaptation. When traveling in America, I usually find these adjustments to be small in scale and yet strangely frustrating--challenges of the "they sell 10 kinds of Coke and yet there's not a single bottle of plain seltzer at the gas station?!?" variety.

And grumble though I do about eating dinner before six, the lack of public transport, and what's not playing at the local cineplex--basically, the way people live their lives in community X as opposed to where I have chosen to make my home--the truth is that I recognize that the smacks about the head these trips deal me are very valuable. I live in a bubble of assumptions about life, surrounded by people who tend to agree with me, and if that shell doesn't get punctured from time to time, I risk forgetting that there are millions of people who live their lives quite differently than I do and, more importantly, I might never learn about why that is.

My mom has a habit of clipping out newspaper articles for me, often of the "opinion" variety from the local newspaper. In the last batch she included a syndicated piece by a conservative columnist named Rod Dreher, who writes for the Dallas Morning News. Titled Polanski Affair Reveals True Hollywood, it was a look at why groups of people--American citizens, Hollywood actors, the Catholic Church, etc.--will quickly rally to defend people "like them" even when controversial (and in some cases illegal) activity is involved. I was willing to follow him through the first few graphs, but then he decided to take down "Art" and the "cult of the artist" and I had to pause:

Does the filmmaking world celebrate child molestation? Of course not. What it celebrates is Art, which is to say, aesthetic pleasure elevated to the level of moral principle. It wasn't until I left reviewing films professionally that I realized fully what immersing one's mind in the imaginative world of contemporary filmmaking can do to one's moral sense. Without realizing it, one might come to see boredom as the root of all evil, and the artist who can deliver us from dullness as a kind of priest who brings us absolution through beauty and transcendence through self-forgetting.

That's greatly oversimplifying matters, admittedly, but this is only a crude version of a concept deeply embedded in modern thought: the cult of the artist. The creative class sees the artist's role as revealing deep truths to humanity, especially verities we may not wish to hear. It's all too easy to accept that men who serve as a bridge between the sacred and the profane are somehow exempt from the moral code the rest of us live by.

Leaving aside the Polanski issue for a moment, since that was flat out illegal, assuming that the moral code "the rest of us live by" is a fixed idea dividing "artists" and "everyone else" seems beyond an oversimplification to me. These codes are fluid in so many ways, variable by so many factors--geography, economics, age, religion. More than most groups, artists seem to flow between them, ferreting out their fundamentals and illustrating how communities of people apply them to their lives. And if we're going to count on this creative class of people to do the exploring and the feeling for those who can't or won't go there for themselves but yet go buy tickets to see what those artists have discovered, is it hypocritical to then chastise those same artists for bad behavior (as long as it's of the legal kind)? Is there a line, or does the value in the exercise require that we don't draw them one?

Now that's not to pretend that the things artists want to show us aren't scary and shocking and uncomfortable sometimes. But you don't have to reflect on the travails of your local drug dealer or watch another Lars von Trier movie if you don't want to.