The Rise of Conservative Art and Poetry | 2018-08-23 09:55:10 (Visits: 856 Times) |  | | By Evan Mantyk
Updated: August 15, 2018 ?
Commentary
When Jon McNaughton unveiled his new painting, “Crossing the Swamp,” on July 31, he probably wasn’t expecting to get as much attention as he did, which included more than 14,000 Twitter comments, 20,000 likes, and news coverage from major outlets like Fox News, USA Today, and ABC News. What the incident reveals is a new awakening in the artistic world.
McNaughton’s painting is conservative art. It depicts the Trump administration in a positive light: The president and his Cabinet navigate the swampy waters of Washington’s bureaucratic corruption. In classical fashion, it is realistic and is directly modeled on the 1851 painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze.
The award-winning poet Bruce Dale Wise wrote a poem describing the painting:
Don Trump with lantern in his hand
is standing in the boat,
with rowers working hard
to keep the nation’s soul afloatToday, news on fine art is usually reserved for the extra-weird art that tears down boundaries and disrupts traditional aesthetics, like a giant bamboo art installation at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston that visitors can climb and robot-made art that is judged by public voting. Such works do make for an interesting news story and public spectacle, but they fall short when judged based on the aesthetic standards that people around the world have held for thousands of years.
Instead of disrupting traditional aesthetics, McNaughton’s “Crossing the Swamp” crosses a new boundary into uncharted territory: contemporary conservative art. Generally speaking, these two words “conservative” and “art” do not go together—not if you want to be taken seriously or receive any kind of funding, anyway.
As dance artist Shawn Lent wrote in an article for the Clyde Fitch Report, “As I look around in my artist circles, I wonder, are all artists liberal?” She warned against the growing echo chamber surrounding left-leaning art and outlined four reasons that conservative art needs more consideration.
The rise of conservative art is also seen in a battle that is being waged in Washington over the future of the long-delayed Eisenhower Memorial. One side, led by the likes of classical sculptors Sabin Howard and Michael Curtis, favors classicism that builds on past traditions such as the accurate and ennobling depiction of the human form. The other side favors a gigantic sort of geometric playground designed by contemporary architect Frank Gehry. The new conservative art trend usually favors tradition while the liberal establishment usually favors progressiveness.
The debate over the Eisenhower Memorial is exceptional because it is a debate that simply wouldn’t have happened in the past few decades. It highlights the rise of conservative art.
“In the giddy days of the Progressive era, America’s progressive architects and theorists wished to replace the eternal classical with a presumed zeitgeist, ‘spirit of the times,’” Curtis writes in his newly released book on Washington architecture. The giddiness of the post-World War II era, peaking in the 1970s, has turned to artistic languor and is now being uprooted by conservative art, Curtis writes.
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