Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 35

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
problems (which evidently points to a sort of political activism) of a given community
with the moral dilemmas in Hamlet is diminishing the amplitude and the breath of the
dramatic text. It is detrimental to turn a staging of Hamlet into a debate on social, economic,
or political issues, as important as those issues might be. ACE demands that untrained
people or non-artists become co-creators of artistic acts, in a similar way to how
the Communist Party wanted to force the multilaterally developed new man out of the
basic condition of creator of agricultural or industrial goods. Let’s remember the communists’
advice: “Professional artistic institutions grant qualified support to amateur artists
collaborating with them in order to increase the qualitative level of the performance”
(Scînteia 1976:1). The idea that artists can be anything you want them to be is utterly
false. According to van Houte (2019:5), “not every artist is a social artist.” I argue that no
artist is a social artist and whoever is a social artist is not fully an artist. The artist’s role
is to shout, to suffer, to never be content, to tell unpalatable truths, to be the king’s fool.
The artist cannot be a politician or a social worker, but someone who primarily points
to possible life and possible people. No one should ask artists (in exchange for money
or whatever else) to automatically engage with the wider public or to ensure diversity by
all means in their work. In the same way, artists cannot and should not be required to
engage with birds, ugliness, old age, blonde ladies, or the colour purple. The artistic act
is the result of the artist living through and consuming a unique, individual experience,
albeit emerging from within a given community and in a given political context, which
overshoots into a possible, new world. The artistic act cannot be anticipated nor programmed
towards any desired outcomes.
5. Conclusion
Isolation, solitude, madness, stubbornness, foolishness, and uselessness in concert with
the day’s social or political priorities should be praised; the moving askew from so-called
relevance measured against the immediate, concrete, and next-minute wishes and needs
of a community should not be dismissed as unproductive. These are key to the artist’s
ability to point towards imagined worlds, towards better, different, and not-yet-existing
types of people and ways of life. Guattari’s value of creation (an effect of what I have
defined as artistic freedom) differentiates�in a definitive way�arts from the social and
political activities and theoretical discourse from praxis. Art must remain a bed for the
flowing river of our inner lives, which are not made only of economic, social, and political
needs. Art is also not a festival, nor a celebration. Art fulfils other, different functions:
it contests, by opposing its possible life and possible people to current states of affairs. In
order to achieve valid possible worlds, artists must be allowed to choose their own path.
The aspect that both regimes (communist and capitalist/neoliberal) overlook is that art
must necessarily puncture through the political, social, and economic givens. Art must
not be put under the control of theoretical discourse, but be allowed to produce new
discursivity as an effect of praxis.
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