I'm going try to respond to this again, after my computer killed my first effort.
Vimothy and Mr. Tea: the ‘if you prefer dictatorship to democracy why don’t you pack your things and move?’ shtick (and its variations) is starting to get
really tiresome. It’s like trying to have a constructive argument over the merits of the 1950s and having some feminist go ‘but what about how they treated women, and blacks, and ...’ every 5 minutes. Valid point, sure, but pretty damn grating after a while. Especially when made as a lame one-liner instead of being woven into a coherent argument.
In places without democracy, you still have the possibility for an outside challenge -- the sense that things can change, this dictator will fall eventually, we can work for it. Our art is dangerous, we can go to prison for it, be beaten for it, die for it. Unlike in "democracies" where, election to election, nothing changes except the faces of the people in power.
Yes, this is pretty much on the mark.
Pretty much on the mark in that, yes, under a tyrant there is the possibility of revolution and:
1. The installation of a new tyrant. (Most revolutions fall under this pattern. In fact, I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that most revolutions have installed worse dictators than the regimes they overthrew. For instance, the Russian revolution was a step back in that Stalin, although equipped with a shiny communist ideology, was actually much worse than the Tzar. I can think of plenty of other examples).
2. The installation of some sort of representative democracy. (These are the kind of revolutions that work, historically. For example: the American Revolution, the 1989 Revolutions, etc).
In the west, as we already have democractic governments, there is little chance of wholesale revolutionary change, which is the sense (pretty much the only sense, AFAIK) in which we have no, or hardly any, "political sway". This has caused people to retreat into irony, disengagement and an annoying lack of seriousness. In the undemocratic third world, where they have unrepresentative tyrannical rulers, the potential exists for radical change, hence people struggling under these governments have
more "sway". (It should be noted, however, that this is strictly
potential sway, not actual. In all these countries there is a deficit of commonly held political power by definition. There might be a revolution, but there is no guarantee that there will be, or that it will be yours if it happens. In fact, and I think someone pointed this out upthread, third world dictatorships have periodic revolutions that don't change anything at all, except the names of the men or party stealing your money and hiding it in off-shore banks).
However, as democracy is part of the problem, the radical change we are talking about could only be a new dictatorship, because those are our only (at present evolutionary levels, at least) choices: democracy or tyranny. We also know from past experience which one is more likely.
So, art in a tyranny potentially has more power, could be more contagious than it ever could in a democracy, in terms of causing regime change and systemic collapse. Probably it will never be seen widely amongst ordinary society; certainly a regime that desires a long rule will want to suppress subversive art and imprison its creators. But at least, says Bey, they are listening. And I agree with that,
to an extent, but the qualifier is very important: it's only noble to risk your life making subversive art if you are doing it with the goal of making your society better, not worse, than it is at the moment. And as we know (following Gavin's logic) that democracy is undesirable, partly because it ends this pattern of governmental instability, we can see that what we are discussing is art in the service of tyranny: art in the service of the heroic and the glorious, not involved in the tedious trap of compromises, aggregates and lowest common denominator politics that western society lays for us all.
I think that's bollocks anyway.
