In this post, I want to continue chatting about the New Hero, someone each of us could become and might want to become. If you are tired of your own lack of heroism, this series of posts may inspire you to think differently about how you might want to live. Today, let’s spend a bit of time thinking about someone like Picasso.
If I’m Picasso and I say about my painting that I enjoy it, that I’m innovative, that it makes me money, and that people like it, haven’t I said just about everything that needs to said?
No.
That I enjoy something, that it is innovative, that I make money from it, and that people like it, leave out the ethics of the matter. If you are someone with a conscience, that will come back to haunt you.
Having customers willing to pay millions of dollars for your painting of a minotaur raping a young woman, having them wink and nod and applaud, having even women critics, curators, and collectors congratulate you on taking that brilliant next step in your career and on finding that astounding new way to use cadmium red, is indeed conspiratorial: the conspiracy to set the ethical bar so low as to make the word laughable and ridiculous.
Ethics? You must be joking!
The New Hero I have in mind doesn’t accept enjoying something, innovating, making money at something, and amusing people by that something as reasons enough to do that something. Better to make very little money and put a bully in his place than make a ton of money producing something a bully would love to hang on his wall. Don’t you think?
The classical arguments against this point of view are:
+ Art is for art’s sake. Art has nothing to do with ethics.
+ You can make any art you like just so long as you are ethical in other parts of your life. If, for instance, your art makes millions, then you could donate some of those millions to charity.
+ Who’s to say which art is ethical and which art isn’t?
+ The artist is a channel and God is directing his hand. That makes whatever he does ethical; and more than that, God-inspired.
+ Ethics is a joke. We are in a post-ethical world where only power and pleasure matter.
+ Who’s to say that making someone happy isn’t of value? If my painting of a rose makes you happy, haven’t I done something valuable, something even noble? Must I paint thorns? Really?
+ You shouldn’t confer on art some power that it doesn’t possess. Let art be entertainment and look to ethical action elsewhere. No protest song, manifesto, or Goya painting ever made a whit of difference.
Oh, and there are plenty more. And they can’t be refuted, because such arguments can never be refuted. If you want to say that “Art is for art’s sake,” well, then, that is what you are going to say. If you want to say that your hand is God’s instrument, well, that is what you are going to say. If you want to say that a Disney movie and a Solzhenitsyn novel must be judged by different criteria, well, that is what you are going to say.
You can say whatever you like and your argument can’t be refuted. But you, as a fellow human being, as someone passing through this place, can be invited to change your mind. You could become a New Hero and change your mind about what you value. Do you want to fill up ten more canvases with cubist images and make your collectors happy? Or do you want to be … better?
If, like Picasso, you enjoy stubbing out your cigarettes on the arms of your girlfriends, I’m sure that you’ll have no trouble basking in the glory of that worldwide conspiracy shouting that you are great and the maybe the greatest ever. If you are that person, you are unlikely to want to become better. But, Pablo, the greatest ever what? Painter? Entertainer? Draftsman? Surely not, human being.
Were you to do all four—live ethically, pay attention to the why of your art, create masterpieces, and have those masterpieces move mountains—that might be the ideal. But a masterpiece alone is not enough of the story. Our New Hero never says—and never thinks—that the work he does can be divorced from his understanding of what is right. Picasso made millions and created art that the world still considers wonderful. But he got life wrong. Our New Hero tries to get life right first; and if that right life also comes with masterpieces, he will smile a smile of satisfaction that Picasso likely never got to smile.
READ MORE: Lighting the Way: How Kirism Answers Life’s Toughest Questions
—
