Most artists have been there. Overwhelmed by terrible finances, or seeking to curry favor with their often shady presenters and gallery owners, or driven by personal insecurity, many good artists will inevitably make numerous compromises with scoundrels to get their work out there. Many artists I know think that that it is not up to them to take a “political” stand and will work blindly for anyone who pays them. Others rationalize their compromises by hoping that the beauty of their work will, somehow, balance the scales towards a better world. Fair enough; unless you live entirely off the grid, you are, at least to some extent, complicit in actions that may be personally disagreeable or even repellent.
But there are limits. And by any reasonable criteria, the atrocities knowingly committed by Putin — a mass murderer whose embrace was warmly returned by numerous world-class Russian performers — require universal condemnation and disavowal.
Recently, an opinion writer in the Washington Post wondered whether Russian artists should be shunned if they refuse to sign statements disavowing Putin’s war:
With the invasion of Ukraine, everyone and everything associated with Russia, the aggressor, is newly measured by their position on the war. Western institutions are canceling Russian artists, sometimes for being too close to President Vladimir Putin — sometimes regardless. Music providers like Sony are suspending their Russian operations, laying off hundreds of employees. The Royal Opera House in London scrapped a summer season featuring the Bolshoi Ballet. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra just postponed three shows by 20-year-old pianist Alexander Malofeev, despite the fact that he has stated publicly, “Every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict.” Long-dead artists, too, are under scrutiny. The Cardiff Philharmonic in Wales pulled the 19th-century liberal homosexual Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky — hardly a nationalist — from its repertoire.
What is the purpose of these cancellations, beyond signaling moral solidarity against Putin’s war? Some benefit presumably accrues to companies and cultural organizations that respond to popular sentiment and fashionable trends; participating in the antiwar movement by demanding anti-Putin statements from Russian artists can help bottom lines. Yet these acts of protest, symbolic and emotionally satisfying for us, deprive vulnerable artists of livelihoods, place them at risk and don’t otherwise accomplish much. What’s more, they play into Putin’s hands by treating artists not as individuals but as cultural ambassadors for his grandiose vision of Russia. This affirms his sense that Russians have been wronged by the world — that Europe and the United States are out to get them, as he has long argued — and therefore justifies further draconian clampdowns and stronger fortifications for Holy Rus.
As for the artists, there’s no easy way to navigate this treacherous terrain, whether they work outside or inside Russia, or consider themselves ambassadors of higher causes and blanch at the conflation of art and politics. Touring artists can make a lot of money, so many of them tend to choose silence to protect their personal brands even in the most compromised circumstances. But now they face pressure to speak out, which can cause trouble for them or their families back home, and in any case doesn’t inoculate them against cancellation.
First, it is very hard for anyone to speak out in an autocracy, especially one like Putin’s. Certainly, it’s silly to cancel a performance of Tschaikovsky. And of course, a single member of the Bolshoi Ballet corps has very little clout. But the larger point is badly wrong.
If mass graves in Bucha — easily predicted back in March when the essay above was published — are not enough to trigger public disavowals of Putinism (even by Russia’s artists without household names), then what will it take? When do the atrocities become so utterly egregious that it becomes incumbent upon anyone with a public presence — including individual artists and their institutions — to openly denounce the barbarity? Will Putin need to open crematoria filled with Zyklon B? Will there need to be widespread chemical attacks before the “trouble for them or their families” beomes outweighed by the prospect of world catastrophe? Or will the use of nuclear weapons finally cross that line?
When the threat is existential — as it is with Putin, with Trump, and other 21st Century monsters — the problem with not speaking out is that your moral sense is damaged and your family gets harmed anyway. No one leaves unscathed. Masha Gessen’s 5th Rule of Autocracy applies to artists and artistic institutions as well:
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises… damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when [autocratic] mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case…that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.