What is particularly concerning is that we are making this mistake about art at the same time as we are making another serious mistake about politics; and that the two mistakes are inversions of each other.
In Donald Trump’s first term, his supporters told us to take the president seriously, but not literally. By now, there seems to be widespread acceptance that Trump’s stated intentions can be disregarded. As weeks go by, this seems an insidious form of denial. Trump is heading more firmly than before in the directions he has long indicated he wants to go: wrecking institutions, replacing stable alliances with an axis defined by strength and weakness, destroying the climate, harming immigrants.
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We have reached a topsy-turvy place when we are being told to treat Trump, more or less, the way we used to treat art. The surface can be ignored; his words should be decoded for deeper meanings. Works of art, meanwhile, should be read only at their most superficial (and most damning) level.
A clue about the danger of this inversion lies in Trump’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky. He is, said Trump, a “dictator”. He should not, Trump told us, have started the war. This is Russian propaganda, now become American propaganda, designed to convince us that lies are true. As the writer Masha Gessen argued during Trump’s first term, drawing on George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, this is a defining feature of totalitarian regimes. As lies become the fabric of society, when statements both must be accepted and cannot be accepted, reality slides away.
Take the recent apparent use of Nazi salutes by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, two of Trump’s best-known supporters. No, we are told, they were doing something else.
This is the landscape before us. At a moment when the most powerful people in the world are doing their best to destabilise reality, to make us distrust even what we see with our own eyes, the one group that has always had a responsibility to question the way power works – not by undermining reality but by forcing us to see it clearly – is being sidelined.
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Artists are an easy target. As individuals, they have little power. If you want to misrepresent their work, who will stop you? But it is sad, because they so desperately want the rest of us to read their work properly, which is to say, with attention to the ambiguities it contains. Meanwhile, we have a powerful American president only too happy to be misread – and many are doing everything they can to help him.
The book mentioned above is Mao II, by Don DeLillo. In part, the novel is about the way that artists have become assimilated, made non-threatening, and what that means for society. DeLillo warns of the types of power that arrive to take their place.
Like Warhol’s pictures, and perhaps Sabsabi’s work, the book asks many questions around power and celebrity, dictatorships and democracies, propaganda, images and the different ways conformity is compelled in different societies.
They are questions worth thinking about – especially now. But not, it seems, in Australia.
Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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