Posted on 03/19/2008 4:52:59 AM PDT by naturalman1975
WHY the shock when a smart guy decides to think about issues and changes his politics? It is not just in Islam where apostasy is a capital offence.
Judging from the reaction to David Mamet's self-proclaimed conversion from liberal to conservative politics, apostasy is also a mortal sin in the arts world. Declaring that he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal", the famed American playwright performed the ultimate act of treason. After turning his back on a lifetime of progressive beliefs, Mamet was flayed for staining his artistic credentials.
Just one question: why does an artist - whether a playwright, a painter or a writer - have to subscribe to left-wing views to make good art?
First to the conversion. Writing in The Village Voice last week, Mamet looked to John Maynard Keynes who, when chastised for changing his mind, famously replied: "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
Mamet changed his opinion after he did some reading for his latest Broadway play. In November, he pits a corrupt, selfish, money-grabbing, realistic president against his left-wing, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
"I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele and a host of other conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than the idealistic vision I called liberalism."
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
Ping.
Interesting...thanks for the info.
An artist doesn't. A propagandist does. The injection of a personal political agenda is the difference between the two.
This article is gold.
Best article in weeks
ok you would have had to have seen the film
Could it be that so much of what is called "art" these days is crap that the free market rejects, and no one will buy? They can't make it without government subsidies, period!
I agree that much of it is crap, but in the circles he formerly haunted, one is required to produce not only crap, but leftist propaganda in order to be accepted by his peers.
Fortunately, art does not depend on a political ideology to be sucessful. Having it lauded in the liberal press, though, may be next to impossible without that credential.
Well, if it looks like a duck, and it walks like duck...
*ping*
“What’s my name, (censored) YOU! THAT’S my name!!!”
I still believe that Mamet is the ultimate MAN’S playwright.
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