Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Artists on the Cutting Edge

Most artists today who see themselves as daring and cutting edge are nothing more than conformists producing devotional works dedicated to the cult of progressive dogma and political correctness. Brave has become, in Orwellian fashion, a synonym for craven. Ed West points it all out in his blog at the Daily Telegraph:

... yet British theatre itself distorts reality for its own political ends. As I wrote a while back, while British arts folk love to “break taboos”, the highest praise, they only like breaking the taboos of 30 years ago, not the sort of ones that today will actually lose you friends. After all, where are the plays about the persecution of Christians in Arab countries? Or plays about the euro delusion? Or even a play that showed modern secular do-gooders as hypocrites in the way that so many show their predecessors and rivals – priests – to be? Or, God forbid, some of the downsides of ANC-run South Africa. They just wouldn’t be made.