Save Your World, Not The World

For the Guardian, G.p friend and colleague Sasha Belenky has written a piece that touches on Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge's Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out in a larger examination of artists working today who romanticize radicalism. Belenksy takes the long view:

The consequences of race riots and the counterculture movement are still being felt, but these works don't focus on the present. Instead, they evoke nostalgia for a revolution that was never fully realised and disappointment at the feebleness of today's political activism. In the exhibition's catalogue, Rebecca Solnit argues that American youth have given up on the 60s-era dream of social revolution in favour of more personal steps like consuming local farm produce or purchasing hybrid cars - small decisions that will nevertheless change society gradually. Her optimism doesn't seem to be shared by the artists in the show.

Often the talk about political art and its recent shortcomings, real and perceived, focuses on methods and aesthetics. What has been discussed less frequently (if at all) is the sort of grand tectonic shifts in the political/curtural landscape. Belensky is arguing in brief that today, political art comes up lacking because political protest takes other forms—namely, market decisions that emphasize personal virtue. One example that immediately comes to mind is this weekend's New York Times Magazine piece on reducing your personal carbon footprint.

Yglesias succinctly explains exactly why this kind of thinking is counterproductive:

Not only are these kind of "personal virtue" efforts insufficient to tackling the challenge of global warming, I think talking about them too much is actually counterproductive. The calculations involved in figuring out the aggregate carbon impact of this or that are just far too difficult for anyone to carry out. What's more, it's generally not going to be possible for a single person through his or her own exertions to really bring about dramatic cuts, and the last thing you need is people sitting around thinking "I drive a Prius, I've done my part" and then not voting the right way or otherwise being disengaged from the political process.

Beyond all that, the market in trendy "green" products has certain counterproductive effects -- it creates a profitable niche market in expensive green-branded goods that most people can't afford and lowers the price of carbon-intensive goods. But in a fundamental sense, the only way to make a green economy work is to make carbon-intensive goods expensive not render them stigmatized and uncool, which should, in tandem, help spur the development of more sustainable alternatives for a not-particularly-cool-or-trendy mass market.

Note, also, that Dick Cheney and like-minded conservatives have adopted the "personal virtue" language as a way of dismissing energy regulation, conservation, and so forth, since folks can just buy a Prius if they'd like to save the world.

Posted by Kriston at April 22, 2008 2:17 PM