Art or Propaganda?
June 26th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
In the New York Times’ blog, Paper Cuts: A Blog About Books, Barry Gewen reviews George Packer’s play, “Betrayed.” As he describes it, the play is about Iraqis who support the American invasion, but then are “broken on the wheel of bureaucratic and military cruelty” when they help the American occupying forces.
In the piece, which ran last April, Gewen writes that he was so swayed that “when the play was over, I wanted to rush out into the street, grab everyone I encountered by the shoulders and shout at them, ‘We’ve got to do something to help those people!’”
This leads Gewen to question whether the play has become something other than art:
There’s no question that “Betrayed” is propaganda — effective propaganda, to be sure, propaganda that rouses your emotions, propaganda on the side of the good guys. But does its message-y, agitprop nature defeat the possibility of its being anything grander?
Gewen seems to sense that he is treading on dangerous territory, so he poses the question to his readers whether they can think of works created as propaganda that have risen to the level of art. The comments are quite insightful. A Don Williams points out, “‘Propaganda’ comes from the Catholic idea of propagating the faith. Obviously, many of our paintings from the Middle Ages were commissioned as works of religious propaganda.” Other candidates mentioned in the comments include Dylan, Arthur Miller, John Dos Passos and Jack London.
I have often called work propaganda, but when I try to be honest with myself I find that it is often hard to separate effectiveness from propaganda, especially when I don’t want to believe what the artist is arguing. Part of me wishes Gewen would have done a better job of defining what makes something propaganda, but clearly he got the feeling from “Betrayed” that it was propagandistic. Maybe that’s the only way to separate art and propaganda–from the sort of taste it leaves in your mouth.