Beginnings of the road to hell

Read Linda Grant's post on cultural boycotts along at Engage:

There is a single solitary judgement we can make of artists and that is the quality of the art they create. Art is there to confuse, disorientate, inspire, promote thought and feeling, outrage, anger and above all, above all else, to humanise, to make us aware that the Other is human like us.

Dostoevsky was a right-wing anti-Semite. His fiction is among the greatest of the nineteenth century. Arnold Schoenberg, who remade twentieth century music, was a right wing Zionist and admirer of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Zionist Revisionist movement which represents everything in Israeli politics today which I most deplore. His rightward political trajectory was propelled by Austrian boycotts against Jewish conductors and composer in the 1920s.

There is no place in culture for political loyalty oaths, boycotts and injunctions on subject matter. We have every right to refuse to read a work, or see a play, or listen to a piece of music. I have never read a novel by Stephen King and one Quentin Tarantino film was enough for me. But when an official boycott policy against artists is implemented, you truly know you are at the beginnings of the road to hell, one in which subversion hardens into official policy, then dogma, instead of the artist's struggle to find a language in paint or words or music to say something we have not heard before.

Amen to that - and read the rest. While you're over there, also read Jon Pike:

There is a genuine members' revolt against the decisions made at Eastbourne. And it will just increase the damage to the AUT if the voices of the membership are misrepresented on the 26th.

To Representative Members of Council (and that's what you are)

Represent your members' views

That’s democracy.