the politics of "political art"

This is something I have noticed in the Art World too. The "Other" world artists are more acceptable when they are political dissidents against their own governments. A purely aesthetic approach becomes   a dead end, as far as acceptance by the First World West is concerned. Unless, of course, you play the  older,exotic Orientalist Game.

Mo Yan, China's first Nobel laureate for literature, has been greeted withsome extraordinary hostility in the west. This week Salman Rushdie described him as a "patsy" for the Chinese government. According to the distinguished sinologist Perry Link, "Chinese writers today, whether 'inside the system' or not, all must choose how they will relate to their country's authoritarian government." And, clearly, Mo Yan has not made the right choice, which is to range himself as an outspoken "dissident" against his country's authoritarian regime.

But doesn't the "writer's imagination" also conflict with the "imagination of the state" in a liberal capitalist democracy? This was broadly the subject that John Updike was asked to speak on at a PEN conference in New York in 1986. Updike delivered – to what Rushdie, also in attendance, described as a "considerably bewildered audience of world writers" – a paean to the blue mailboxes of the US Postal Service, which, he marvelled, took away his writings with miraculous regularity and brought him cheques and prizes in return.

Such is the case with Mo Yan's deeply interesting fiction. His writing, however, has hardly been mentioned, let alone assessed, by his most severe western critics; it is his political choices for which he stands condemned. They are indeed deplorable, but do we ever expose the political preferences of Mo Yan's counterparts in the west to such harsh scrutiny?

In fact, we almost never judge British and American writers on their politics alone. It would seem absurd to us if the Somali, Yemeni or Pakistani victims of Barack Obama's drone assaults, miraculously empowered with a voice in the international arena, accused the US president's many literary fans of trying to put a human face on his unmanned killing machines; or if they denounced Ian McEwan, who once had tea with Laura Bush and Cherie Blair at 10 Downing Street, as a patsy for the Anglo-American nexus that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions more.

Nevertheless, they would not be wrong to detect an unexamined assumption lurking in the western scorn for Mo Yan's proximity to the Chinese regime: that Anglo-American writers, naturally possessed of loftier virtue, stand along with their governments on the right side of history. Certainly, they are not expected to take a public stance against their political class for waging catastrophic – and wholly unnecessary – wars. In fact, very few of them use their untrammelled liberty to do so. Many even pride themselves on their "apolitical" attitude. Furthermore, their political opinions risk no widespread opprobrium even when these mock the same values of freedom and dignity that Mo Yan is evidently guilty of violating.

Still, it is hard not to notice how writers who enjoy both free speech and considerable influence choose to amplify the orthodoxies of political and military elites, safely remote from their real-life consequences – wholesale destruction of human lives. Given this, it seems a bit unfair to expect Mo Yan alone to embrace the many perils of dissent and nonconformity.

For, in actuality, most novelists, in the west as well as the non-west, avoid direct confrontation with powerful institutions and individuals, especially those that not only promise fame and glory to writers but also, crucially, make it possible for them to stay at home and write. To point out this routine semi-complicity with the status quo is not to condone Mo Yan's terrible choices. It is to acknowledge the imperfect nature of our own socio-economic and political arrangements, in which missile silos have long co-existed invisibly with mailboxes, and the writer, however free of external coercion, is not always ready or willing to interrogate his own relationship with power.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/13/mo-yan-salman-rushdie-censorship?CMP=twt_gu