Very good points all around. This is something I find myself thinking about a lot, too. Art may seem unimportant. But art, particularly stories (as in, books and movies) are of great importance because they determine how people will view themselves in relation to the world, what positions they want to attain, what associations they make between things and emotions. Stories have power. A movie like A Beautiful Mind has the power to make something as (typically) boring as mathematics into a highly gripping and emotional tale. The Imitation Game made a brave hero out of an autistic gay mathematician. Anyone who watched Midnight Express will spend at least a couple of days feeling hatred for Turkey.

The most interesting, evocative, emotional ideas come from the Left, even when only a few thousand or even a few hundred eyeballs are watching. If we want the world to adopt our ideas, we much learn to replicate their success while freeing ourselves from their weaknesses.

The reality is that this connection between art and the left is often the other way around.

Go back in time to, let's say, the 16th century and you will find a western world in which accomplished artists will be respected, but not worshipped. It used to be that artists were seen as craftsmen: just like building a church required an intricate understanding of the topic and the architect's extraordinary efforts to apply his knowledge to a set of highly specific problems that each project brought with it, the composer requires intricate knowledge of music theory and then the personal effort to make use of it, come up with and develop motifs, set them all in an exciting harmonic progression, while taking care of voicings and texture and structure - all so that in the end, he could sit at his organ and provide the religious events with music worthy of its context (Bach being used as an example here.)

With the age of enlightenment (17th century onwards) came a new perspective, in which life should no longer be about tribalism and spirituality, but about the individual and the rational. With romanticism (18th century onwards) came a focus on the artist's emotions and their expression. The artist was now no longer a craftsman making art for a specific purpose; he was a medium through which strong emotions were channeled.

This shift didn't immediately change the nature of art or artists. It was a slow process. Artists tend to learn from those who came before them and adapt their art according to their own views. Under the cultural trend of romanticism these views, and these changes, kept going in one specific direction: the one we find ourselves in now, in which an artist must be tortured, in which an artist must not show professionalism because it is associated with insincerity, in which we prefer to keep idealized version of the artist in our head (the troubled genius, the rebel, the eccentric) than actually go to the effort to understand the artist's work and how he came to create such works. In fact, often it seems like art moves into the background and the idiosyncrasies and controversies and political views become more important than what he or she actually creates.

Such a culture of art appeals to freaks and wannabe-freaks. Two dreams shared among many teenagers in the 20th century were becoming an astronaut or a rockstar. Comparing the two shows what I mean. When young teens used to dream about growing up to be a rockstar, they would dream about smashing their guitars on-stage in front of roaring crowds or taking drugs and trashing hotel rooms. Art culture today is about chaos, irresponsibility, anger, resentment, being different - aggressively so - and never missing a chance to show it. Such a culture simply shares countless qualities with today's political left. That's all. Leftists don't make better art. The left cannot even necessarily be said to have control over the art world. The art world is simply dominated by a culture that happens to be nearly identical with the culture of politically left-wing people.

So, that's the problem. What are the possible solutions?

That's tricky. If we figured we might simply roll things back to how they were - when artists were studious craftsmen who cared about art more than about proving to the world how cool they are and how little of a fuck they give - we run straight into the problem of human nature.

Truth is, the current art culture came to be for a good reason: it's cool. Imagine your favorite band. Would you still like that band as much if they were a couple of nerdy, glasses-wearing, lanky dorks who give awkward interviews and don't really have any convictions and perform each concert by getting on stage, picking up their instruments, calmly staring at their instruments while playing their songs and then leaving the stage? Or do rockstar antics and flashy clothes and no-fucks-given interviews not add a certain something that, while entirely unrelated to the music itself and its notes and snare hits and samples and basslines, improves the overall experience somehow and makes you love the band more than you otherwise would?

Getting rid of this art culture would mean willingly giving all that up. Art culture would look very different. Some things that people enjoy about it today would be gone. And if there's something people do not like at all, it's giving up a pleasure they are already used to.

So that likely won't work. Another solution would be for non-left-wing artists to adopt to our current art culture. While I think that's possible to some degree (what if the system the artist rebels against is that of the authoritarian left? some of this can be seen in some comedians' current standup specials) but I think that there are essential elements to the left and right that cannot simply be changed or adapted. The right will always be prioritize personal responsibility over collective responsibility, which makes it difficult to create the typical artistic narrative of "creating some movement, dude" and "we gotta care more for each other, man." The postmodernism that underlies any truly pretentious artist who makes a career out of never being specific, always being cryptic, and thereby creating for himself an image constructed entirely out of what the audience projects onto him is uniquely leftist.

So what to do? I don't know. One thing would be for any artist who is fed up with our current art culture to focus more on art again than on narratives and to reject the temptation of modern art - specifically of lazily creating something of bad quality and then using postmodernist strategies to argue that it is of great importance and responding to anyone who disagrees with "you just don't get it" - and instead make an actual effort to create something great, or at least something good. But this will likely require a long time to change our cultural landscape, if it works at all. Chances are that the cronyism typical of the art world (whether it's classical music, popular music, film, book publishing) will make sure that (consciously or unconsciously) leftist artists will keep getting the most exposure even if they no longer at all represent the wider art world, same way that this is already the case in journalism and Big Tech.