Should creative artists be politically engaged?

There is increasing concern about political involvement in the arts, with Trump's sequestration of the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC - see photo above - a prime example. Which raises the important question, should creative artists be politically engaged? One position on this is the one taken by Benjamin Britten. When he was asked in 1942 by a tribunal for the registration of conscientious objectors "What would you do if Britain was invaded?" Britten replied "I believe in letting an invader in and then setting a good example".

But a contrary position is encoded in a 1985 speech by the award-winning author, environmentalist, Zen adept, and womanizer Peter Matthiessen. Lance Richardson's masterly new biography of Matthiesen contains the following quote, which in these increasingly dark times is an important wake-up call not just for American writers, but for creative artists all over the globe.  

At a meeting of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), Peter Matthiesen was supposed to give a keynote address on "literature and the land". Instead he went rogue: "I think I'm just going to veer away from the topic and use this opportunity to say something I feel very strongly about - American writing in general.  

I feel that as a group, American writers have not taken responsibility, politically, for the benefit of this country.  I feel we've lost that position that Sartre of Camus had in their countries. We have so many good writers who are really talented, but how many of them spend a measurable portion of their time writing on issues that are controversial, or for the public welfare? Camus said when he got the Nobel Prize* that part of a writer's obligation was to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.

... I think in a sense we've avoided our responsibility here. We may have notoriety, we may even achieve fame at a certain point, but we have no power at all... Wherever we are, wherever we are located in the country, there's some damned thing that ought to be written about forcefully... we're interested in the lyrical possibilities and the literary possibilities, but I would love to see that literature applied, even at the risk of being sued. I think we owe at least part of our work to that.

* Matthiesen misattributed this quote. It does not come from Camus' Nobel Prize acceptance speech. It comes from his lecture 'Create Dangerously' given at the University of Uppsala in December 1957. 

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