Art is the Tugboat of the Resistance

I still remember a vivid and disturbing dream I had when I was 12 years old. I saw Beethoven shackled by Hitler and forced to conduct a Nazi orchestra playing his own music. It was worse than torture for him. Beethoven turned to me and said, “Save me, use your art to fight fascism!” It was a fascinating dream. One of the greatest artistic ironies is how music that was intended as a beacon of freedom and equality was turned into fascist propaganda used against the people it was meant to uplift. I also didn’t have much interest in classical music at age 12. Ever since this dream I have to check in with myself periodically and ask: have I been heeding Beethoven’s command?

I’ve been silent too long because I forgot I have power. All of January was spent in an indigestive daze of anxiety for both personal reasons and political reasons, but really they are one and the same. I’ve been wondering, like so many others, if I should leave all my Meta platforms for ethical reasons, not to mention I’m really not having fun there anymore anyway. Yet the larger issue is that sharing my work stopped feeling important because I didn’t feel it was urgent.

Back in November I mapped out everything I wanted to accomplish in 2025, and it’s a lot! As tempted as I was to share it with the world I remembered how I did the same thing in early 2024 and then proceeded to do exactly none of it. I don’t want to make any false promises this time, but I also don’t want to buckle under the falsehood that art making is really just navel gazing, self indulgent foolishness, a form of escapism.

I know you’re all wiser than I am. You already know art is important, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I know it deep in my bones too, but why is it important, and why would we be led to believe that it isn’t in the first place?

Because the arts are so underfunded and seemingly underappreciated in this country it’s no wonder that artists feel discouraged and tossed aside – not to mention how AI is taking so many of our jobs. This feeling is about to get worse under the current administration, but only if we take their actions as a reflection of our inherent worth, and I think we know better than to do that. Art in this country is certainly underfunded, but I wouldn’t say it’s underappreciated. Art surrounds us in every corner of our lives. All forms of marketing, advertising, and social media content rely on it. Chocolate bar packaging, wrapping paper, billboards, the patterns on your socks and your dinner plates, the greeting cards you buy...all of this is the work of artists. If anything we are so surrounded by art that we take it for granted, thinking that its only use is for advertising, yet belittling artists who turn to advertising to make a living as “selling out.” Commercial art is still art, and it’s one of the few ways artists can make a living in a country that doesn’t think the arts should be funded, but this is beside the point. If all the art in your life disappeared overnight you would notice, and its absence would be alarming.

This means that art is truly very important just to make daily life bearable, but my question is: why is art important to “the resistance,” especially if you don’t make overtly political art?

Like I do, I turned to my spirit friend Franz Schubert – on his birthday yesterday. At first he seemed quite reticent, but then threw a lot of information my way in short order. I bought a biography on Schubert last week called Schubert and his Vienna by Charles Osborne, so it was still sitting beside my bed unopened. I picked it up and asked Franz “Why is art important in difficult political times?” I instantly noticed a folded scrap of newspaper in the backflap that I didn’t see when I bought it. This was a review of the book from the New York Times back in 1986 when it came out, and here is the relevant quote:

“We encounter the composer at the height of the Biedermeier period, when post-Napoleonic Europe lay in the grip of Prince Metternich, a martinet whose dream was to push the world back to the years before the French Revolution. The Austrian middle classes, excluded from the seats of power, found refuge in the simple pleasures of life, especially music.”

Well, here is certainly one purpose of art in difficult political times! I then opened the book to a random page to find more answers and saw this quote:

“Under the cloud of the Metternich system, there blossomed with the Biedermeier one of the most charming and sensitive epochs. It is hardly an exaggeration to describe this rich intellectual and artistic development as the consequence and result of a kind of ‘inward Immigration.’ People, given no say in matters political, barred from all participation in public affairs and the shaping of social conditions, withdrew from outward concerns into the intimate circle of the family and friendly relations with their fellow creatures. The harmless gay parlour game, the sentimental literary salon, the cultivation of music at home: these formed the basis of a widely ramified deeply rooted cultural life.”

Fascinating! But, we here in America in this time certainly do have a “say in matters political,” even if this is a power we rarely flex in our day to day lives. Why don’t we? In the paragraphs before the above quote it was explained that 19th century Austrians were accustomed to living with despots and couldn’t dream of a freedom they hadn’t yet tasted, but Americans? Why do we act so powerless?

This morning I came across the term “learned helplessness,” which I had only encountered over ten years ago when I completely misunderstood the concept. I looked it up and with new understanding realized what it says about Americans’ general lack of political action.

Learned helplessness is a conditioned way of thinking where when one is abused enough one thinks they have no power or control over situations to the point that they can’t see a way out of their pain even when a solution is offered to them. This made me realize why the main actors in protests and activist movements are young people. They haven’t yet been conditioned into this state of learned helplessness. This isn’t to say that the activist movements of the past haven’t been successful because they certainly have, just not as successful as quickly as was hoped for. Too many see this as defeat without realizing how slowly social and political change tends to come about. The good news is that if you can learn helplessness you can also learn optimism.

After all of these late night and early morning epiphanies I decided to meditate and ask Franz more directly about the purpose of art in difficult political times.

I saw him playing Beethoven’s Apassionata Sonata on a piano in an empty concert hall. He wore a tuxedo but had a cigarette dangling from his lips. “I’m so happy I can now play Beethoven well with hands of light!” he said. “It was the art created in my era, and Beethoven’s and Mozart’s era before me, that paved the way for Vienna’s 1848 revolution. Sometimes the effect of art on society is slow, but it is necessary.”

What does that even mean? It dawned on me while doing dishes. Like minded artists find each other, support each other, and encourage each other to live according to their own eccentric ideals. In 18th and 19th century Vienna they were dreaming up not just art, but also a lifestyle that wasn’t supported in their time and place by the powers that were. This was a time when music patronage in particular moved from the long traditional spheres of church and aristocracy to dependency on freelancing with grifting music publishers. In such an environment artists depended on building and maintaining strong communities more than ever. Communities became more involved with the arts in return, and more seduced by the lifestyles their favorite artists embodied. Romanticism was born, and when a critical mass of people wanted to feel supported in that lifestyle, once they saw what could be, then they revolted. Don’t dismiss the power of the utopias that artists build, not only through their work and ideas, but also through their lives and communities.

And here is an article more relevant to our own time and place about how the Harlem Renaissance used their community built around the arts to lay the foundation of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. May it also be noted that right now, at the very beginning of Black History Month, Trump’s administration is moving to end all federal observances of it.

Back during Trump’s first term Franz told me in a meditation that “art is the tugboat of the resistance,” and now I understand why. It is our engagement with the arts that slowly pulls us into growing our empathy, expanding our ideals, and wanting better for ourselves and our children. But tugboats aren’t known for being fast. These are slow movements, but all the more important for the lasting changes they bring about. We can’t let these changes be undone!

Now what are my takeaways here about the role of art in difficult political times​?

How is my art important? I include this here as my own personal pep talk, so here’s a list of personal projects and art series I’ve created since 2016 along with what I see as their importance in the grand scheme of things:

Well, that’s not too shabby! I think I get flummoxed when I confuse importance with urgency. Art is important, but it is not always urgent. Resistance is both urgent and important, so we need to make time for it every day. I made a plan to email my congress people (because I absolutely cannot make a phone call without an instant IBS flareup) every weekday using the list of issues and scripts from 5Calls.org. I’m going to enjoy a nice cup of fancy tea while I do it, so it gets the title “Teasistance,” and I’ll have more to say about this practice later.

I have to remember that art is also urgent for me because my future survival depends on the flourishing of my artistic practice, and so does the survival of other artists in your community, especially if retirement is going to be increasingly out of reach for those who are still working today. Support them generously when able!

It’s also necessary to remember that if something is important but not urgent that doesn’t mean it gets ignored. If you don’t see your own art making practice as urgent, please don’t give it up because we still need it! If your art is for self care purposes only then that is also important, and often urgent.

Are you an artist struggling with the validity of being an artist making and selling work in these times? I would love for you to make a list of why your art is important and share it with me, and/or on social media. Let everyone know we’re doing important work. Art builds community, and it is the tugboat of resistance!