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Comment by bhrgunatha | Hacker News Reader

> Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

I never really studied history in any depth. Do you think this is just hyperbole? By which I mean is she simply overstating or exaggerating the role of art in historic events? Am I taking it too literally - that art is the first step towards cultural upheaval? Can anyone give some examples of art effecting some kind of huge social change?

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"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

Supposedly Abraham Lincoln said this to Harriet Beecher Stowe in reference to her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited for changing the North's attitude towards slavery.

That's a really great example, thanks!

The gift of the artist is to express ideas that are in the air of a particular time, but have not yet been articulated. So it is inevitable that a cultural upheaval would have its origins in the art of a culture, even if it is not easy to draw a direct corollary. The art does not effect the change, except maybe in exceptional circumstances, it only expresses what is already in the air.

You don't have to look very hard to find examples. Take The Wire in the United States, which is all about the futility of the War on Drugs and the harm it causes to its citizens. Only now are we are seeing the first steps of decriminalization in states like Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Did The Wire effect that change? No, probably not. But it did articulate the attitude long before it manifested in policy.

I think you've expressed my question a bit clearer than I did.

Does art cause change or reflect change that is occurring?

I think it's probably more like a feedback loop rather than a simple cause and effect with both reflecting and reacting to the other.

Art is often where change first appears, but it's also where change starts to figure itself out; to find a syntax and a vocabulary. In this sense, it's more than just a reflection, it's an agent - which is not to say it's causing the change, so much as channeling it.

It can also go the other way by leading us away from things. 1984 is the classic example of a work that gave people the tools - in the form of language and images - that they could use to describe all manner of disturbing developments that could take place within heavily centralized, industrialized nations. Dystopian visions are now so deeply engrained that any efforts to move government in that direction meet an immediately negative response.

Like the immune system, they don't block everything. But they block enough for us to know we'd be in very bad shape without them.

For anyone in London, it's worth seeing the Disobedient Objects exhibition at the V&A, "this exhibition is the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. It demonstrates how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design."

It's free.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects...

The "art of words" has certainly effected huge social change. This is self-evident if you include political commentary and philosophy (Common Sense, Wealth of Nations, Federalist Papers, Communist Manifesto, etc.). If you restrict it to fiction, a common example is 1906 novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

If you're talking about art like paintings, plays, music, etc., I don't have any examples off the top of my head. However, I think it's a truism that art is often the first/only safe place to criticize the powerful. I don't know if that's really art effecting change as much as art giving a voice to underlying forces for change.

Well, I hadn't considered academic books as art. I was automatically thinking about literature and other types of art like painting or music as I think that is what she was referring to the speech. After looking up The Jungle on Wikipedia [1] it seems like exactly what she was referring to. Thanks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle#Federal_response

It's easy to point to examples when we construe art (as she does here) as including all forms of creative writing or storytelling. Just one example is work by many literary scholars on the 18th century novel as helping create a new sense of interiority and private life (i.e., reading a novel alone replaced gathering around a fire to hear a story). Or, going back much further, Alexander the Great's obsession with the Iliad would surely count as significant for world history.

Perhaps the real root cause of upheaval such as pervasive discontent correlates with occurrences of revolutionary art. Perhaps the art then acts as an amplifier or accelerator of the discontent, creating a feedback loop. Clearly it helps when the "art" is easily distributed and widely understood (printing press, literacy).

I just finished http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide

Great book, I got the Peter Constantine translation. It was published 30 years before the French revolution.

To answer your question, the fact that the powers that be at the time took the trouble to ban the book is some indication as to the potential they felt it had for disruption.

If you want a behavioral explanation, you should consider the morale of any kind of resistance. Such morale depends on some kind of foundation and support. Inspiration for these may be found in art.

IMO, no, it's false, it just sounds _so_ good.

There is obviously a feedback loop, but that doesn't mean that change begins in art. Art is, like everything else, as much a factor as a product of the growing mindset changes.

You can certainly find examples, but if you think about it, 99% of the art didn't cause any shift.

Is the US socialist after "The Grapes of Wrath", or has race become less of an issue after "To Kill a Mockingbird"?

Was the history of Spain very influenced by Picasso being a communist, or portugal by Pessoa being anti-catholic?

You are correct; Good art has an amplification effect on what already exists. It translates an experience that affects one person (the artist, or a character in the artist's imagination) to an experience that resonates for a larger audience.

If a work of art has enough emotional impact to change the habits of thought, then it is plausible that it could change behavior as well; but here it may be difficult to discern the primary work of art from second-order effects: the discussions that arise in response to or in criticism of the art. These second-order effects may drive the actual impetus for change.

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