The peoples who kill their artists

It may recall "the peoples who killed their prophets." That is exactly what I meant. Of course, I am not attributing the role of a prophet to artists. I think the role attributed to art and the artist in the modern world is an utterly hypocritical, utterly fetishistic one. The notion that art, in its ordinary course, is a source that will give us the truth that we are heedless of and in need of — what knowledge, what message or role is being substituted for by this? Perhaps the role of a prophet.

But then, we are secular, and in a world whose enchantment we have broken, no revelation was going to come to us from the heavens!

Fine, but have we not also seen that, however great the powers we imagine for ourselves, our reason is not enough for us, that emotions can come and take both our reason and ourselves captive wholesale, and how, under these captivities, we drag humanity from disaster to disaster? In a disenchanted world where no revelation will come from the heavens, who will save us? Art? The artist?

There is something in it to keep one occupied with this expectation of a savior.

The secular world, precisely out of this expectation, produced a myth of art as savior. The left, in the moments when it felt the scarcity of revelation most acutely, showered this savior with great praise. In today's world that we all share, the myth of the savior, sacred, heroic artist has turned into a field of untouchable acceptance. The expected savior, the Messiah, is now the artist.

Perhaps some very worrying analyses were also produced about the fate of "the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility." Walter Benjamin said that, against the fascism produced by the aestheticization of politics, the politicization of art could be the real saving solution. Art was thoroughly exalted as an ideal, as another kind of source of truth, as a medium from which we could expect what is to come and find what we are expecting.

Let us concede that the need for art took as its problem the arrogance, the self-sufficiency, the subjecthood into which the human self fell, first before itself and then before nature and other beings. There was to be a voice, a message that would, before anything else, rescue the human being from this heedlessness, from his wrong positioning in the world, from the alienation this positioning produced. There was an anxiety, perhaps a genuine anxiety, a human cry. The human being is indeed in loss, and all these analyses are analyses that feel and make one feel this loss. For this anxious human being, art was placed in the position of a revelation, and the artist in that of a prophet (a messiah).

Of course, all this was done with rather lofty philosophical considerations. At a more popular level, however, the sophists, the craftsmen, the dealers of art built the world of power of this grand claim to truth. In this world of power, in Jean Baudrillard's words, "art turns into a conspiracy that seizes banality, waste and mediocrity as value and ideology: the conspiracy of art." Let us perhaps dwell separately later on the exclusion and lynching Baudrillard suffered when he exposed this conspiracy with exactly the kind of artistic flavor that best fits its definition. For before he exposed this conspiracy, that is, before he pointed out the ideological delusions in the meanings attributed to art, his words enjoyed great favor in those same circles. But with his criticisms and the reactions they drew, he showed just how far from genuine that favor was.

What is expected of the artist is, in any case, sufficiently neutralized by commissioning the artist's work. Today the ideal of art has been sufficiently slaughtered by this commodification, yet each time it manages to reproduce its own lie and put it on the market.

The latest example can be seen in the treatment Erkan Oğur was subjected to. Oğur, who was regarded within his own circle of listeners as an "artist" with all the lofty and sacred meanings laden upon him, simply showed that he cannot fearlessly and unhindered say a truth he has reached with his own audience. His audience reminded him, very tragically, of a limit to what he may say: since you are an artist, you cannot see things differently from the way we see them, you cannot point to a life different from the one we want to live, you cannot suggest to us an attitude different from our political attitude.

Yet all he did was to take, from within art's own jargon and manner, a warning, instructive, communicative step that could very well have opened up a new horizon on the situation the country is in. It was to give us a key with which to open from the inside the dungeon doors in which we have locked ourselves. What they did together with İbrahim Kalın was a very beautiful, very meaningful work.

Erkan Oğur was not given the chance to exist as an artist, as someone who possesses his own truth. His own people did not accept the inspiration he drew from his art, nor the possibility of truth this inspiration might contain. They denied the source of inspiration of his art. And yet, with all the meanings attributed to it, did art not have the right, the possibility and the openness to say things that we do not expect, that we do not hope for, that are not within our grasp? If the artist is always going to say what we hope for, what we want, what we desire, how could he differ from us, and what could he offer us in that state?

Whoever is to save us should be, at least in part, someone from outside the pits in which we flounder, should he not? Why should we drag him too into the pit in which we flounder and destroy him?

The Qur'an curses the peoples who killed their prophets. Moreover, those peoples are famous for constantly asking that a prophet be sent to them, and they boast about it a great deal. Of course, from the moment they boast, they have shut their ears to the prophet who is to come, and have decided what they will take from him and what they will not. Even if they do not kill him bodily, they kill him by trying to make him resemble themselves, by dictating the content of his message, and finally by interpreting it according to their own desires.

The left is a subscriber to killing its own artist by making him resemble itself. Some call this neighborhood pressure. It is a far graver situation than that.