Sheung Wan Art Manifesto

Written in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong, China, November 2019

I call this the Sheung Wan Art Manifesto because I wrote it in Sheung Wan at a coffee shop in the waning days of Hong Kong. 

The Mahabharata is a story. Jesus spoke in parables. The most lasting and impactful communications are stories and art.

If an idea can be expressed in an essay, it should be. It doesn’t need art. Sometimes ideas that can be expressed in essay are expressed as art. And that’s where boring television comes from.

Great art communicates, through stories and aesthetics, ideas affixed to moods and sense, that are too complex for essays and yet more moving and lasting.

Art helps us grow as individuals and as a people, and our civilization flows downstream from its art. Art is the fundamental primitive of culture which is the basis of everything.

It is common for people to be bothered by things they don’t understand and therefore cannot control.

Small-minded people with political goals are bothered by the ambiguities of art. There is a common profile of a small-minded person with political goals who fears comedy, irony, art and ambiguity because they do not understand any of them. You can call them, to be nice, Essayists.

Most importantly, they fear art and try to control it.

Artistically insensitive people with political goals and power, like, say, Stalin, Joseph Goebbels, Kim Jong Il or their many contemporary fellow travelers, are dangerous for art and for freedom of thought and life.

Many people in our contemporary society don’t have the power Goebbels had only 80 years ago, but they do embrace the process that he and people like him embraced – and collectively they have similar power over art. They embrace the idea that anyone who disagrees with the elite should be excluded from society and that popular media should support the views of their specific group.

Such people today have a lot of influence in American culture.

That often skews content creation away from the tastes of the people at large and it chills content creation in general.

Life and art and open humanism tend to the fullness of life and have forever struggled against the desires of Essayists to harness art to support political goals and to limit art to the state of the op-ed: explicit, on the surface, never ironic, conforming to the prevailing ideology.

If you are happy with today’s criticism and with resultingly simple minded, middle of the road and mediocre shows then you may be an Essayist. You must believe that everything in our modern life — our art, our flirtations, our fashion, everything, should be governed by whatever politics prevail today. You believe in consensus and control first, not art first. You must choose one. And if you choose politics over art, if you embrace unfreedom as your core creed, you are denying art and the voice and humanity of those artists. That is an expression of hate. Don’t fool yourself into believing that this is a new or innovative idea. Goebbels had it before you. And other oppressors before him.

It is this limiting, narrow, anti-humanist instinct that artists and humanists must fight against for the sake of our enduring freedom of life, of culture and of thought.

Freedom of art among artists and freedom of thought amongst the people are closely related. We are experiencing in the US an oppression of freedom of both art and thought. It is time to recognize it, call it out, and reject it.

The proposal of Sheung Wan Art Manifesto 1 is to learn from some of the negative examples around the world, to leave hate behind, and to embrace more acceptance instead of more unacceptance, to embrace more freedom instead of less freedom, more free art instead of less free art, and to achieve a better world through more love not more hate.

We should embrace an appreciative and open art culture where people succeed or fail in the free market of ideas and expression, not because they conform to a specific ideology. Because in the end it almost always turns out that bien pensant establishments are in error in important ways and that cutting edge artists who are considered outré are in fact truthful and right. I don’t mean the toady pet artists who support the establishment line, the mascots of the ancien regime. I mean independent, truthful artists. Especially because art that is unfettered by censorship often approaches something that is more profound than merely “right,” but it is especially this sort of art that is often too ambiguous for contemporary censors to endure. To have this art you must defend all art.

Love for one to the exclusion of another is a version of hate. Better is an ideology of love for all races and genders. And an ideology of freedom. Only love for all — all people and all ideologies — is love. As Martin Luther King said, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

Art communicates reality and sympathy through contradictions and fictions and this has never sat well with small minded Essayists who become uncomfortable unless everything is explicitly conforming at all times clearly to their ideology.

Wise commentators embrace the chaos and love of humanism and art, and its diversity, knowing that in the long term it takes us in the right direction and that the alternative is to live in a nightmare where art is reduced to essay.

But there are no such leaders today speaking up for humanism, for error, for the crooked path of art. And there are many voices trying to reduce and control expression. For all of our sakes, that tendency of mind, the tendency that arises in every generation, always beloved by the narrow-minded, must be identified, named and shunned.

Ideologues have never been comfortable with freedom, least of all artistic freedom. Marxism, for example, which clings to primacy in the liberal arts under various brand names, was never an artistic movement, a humanist movement or a pro-art movement.

For Marxists, art only has value as an expression of ideology. Ideology always comes before art. And most critics these days in Hollywood have explicitly or implicitly embraced this framework.

To exist in a totalitarian regime with the same dynamics of censorship, self-censorship and resulting mediocrity does not require explicit totalitarian politics, it merely requires that critics embrace a monolithically Essayist, anti-art and ideological point of view and then influence producers and art makers to do the same, which has happened in Hollywood.

Oppression of artists always feels right to the oppressors and to the people who comprise the establishment. Oppressors never feel like oppressors to themselves. They feel like they are merely supporting what works for their society and what every right-thinking person agrees with. This has always been true. But, in retrospect, oppression is always clearly seen as just oppression and consensus. The hard work of being pro art is recognizing that getting people to support the consensus — even though it may seem sensible and unobjectionable — is anti freedom and anti art.

The essence of Sheung Wan Art Manifesto 1 is that only freedom absolutists are pro art.

So there are 5 principles that should be embraced or that can be encapsulated here, which are:

1. Only freedom absolutists are pro art. There is no middle ground.

2. Humanity before ideology. Life and love, family and serendipity, complex relationships and social milieus, tolerance of ambiguity, before politics. People as people first, not political actors first. Politics is impermanent and of secondary importance. Anyone who primarily reviews film or television series or books, plays or poems from a political point of view, unless the work is explicitly political and calls for that, is simply anti-art.

3. Forgiveness. We should be more forgiving — of ourselves, of each other and even of historical figures from the past. As Whitman said, “be curious, not judgmental.” Without forgiveness, we will have no freedom because people will be too self conscious to do anything. Today, we enjoy having cultural trip wires and linguistic land mines that we use to punish people who happen upon them. Few really believe that people who commit one faux pas are revealing some deep inner moral flaw, but someone must be in the Coliseum tomorrow, someone’s blood must run down the great cable news pyramid of Tenochtitlan ‪at 9 o’clock‬. This is done as a sort of virtue theater, but also just for our entertainment. It is the modern Coliseum and not much more. No one should feel proud of it. As Schiller said, “Art is the daughter of freedom.” And freedom is the daughter of forgiveness.

4. Justice before goals. No society has fared well in the eyes of history that punished innocent people for fun, for theater, or to accomplish goals unrelated to the culpability of the people punished. This kind of modern inquisition is always regarded in the long run as a moral failure, no matter how valid the cause, and rightfully so. The surest way to get on the “wrong side of history” is to support punishments not for individual failings but for group membership, even if you cloak such a persecution in some other guise.

5. Fun before division. Finally, it is important to conceptualize and embrace a society where fun and play are possible and where there is enough understanding of each other that we can have fun together always without overly worrying about offending one another. The decline of American comedy over the past ten years has been sad to see. If you’re not pro-fun, you are an oppressor and you are not making people’s lives better.

Families at their best enjoy what is good about each other and are quick to forgive foibles. I hope we can find a path to being more familial in the next years and if we do not, there are reasons to worry about our culture and country.