Charlie Brown has it right.  At one point in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” he and Peppermint Patty are sitting together under a tree talking.  Suddenly she says “Explain love to me, Chuck.”  After a thoughtful pause, he responds, “I can recommend a book or a painting or a song or a poem, but I can’t explain love.”  Love is one of those things the key to whose understanding, and even clear articulation, lies outside our materialistic world.  After all, that’s why there are love songs and love poems: workaday expression doesn’t cut it.

Art has the ability to express all kinds of things that are complicated, not just love and happiness.  And not only positive things, either.  Some of the most complicated emotions inherent in a society are not the warm and fuzzy type.

In 1946 Whittaker Chambers wrote about the relationship between the grief and sorrow inherent in slavery and the single most distinctive art which that awful institution produced:  the African-American spiritual.  “Grief,” he wrote, “like a tuning fork, gave the tone, and the Sorrow Songs were uttered.”  Spirituals stand as poignant reminders, conveyed through profound art, of a profound wrong.

Like then—and like always—there are many artists today who seek to convey, through their art, similar indictments of what they perceive to be injustice.  The fruit of those artistic labors can be uncomfortable, but that’s indicative of the capacity and power of art.  “Art has the power to be the conscience of a society,” explains Stephen Heyde, Conductor and Music Director of the Waco Symphony Orchestra.  And sometimes our conscience tells us things that make us feel uncomfortable.

This distinctive and particularly powerful role that art can play is closely related to the passionate controversies that sometime spring up.  It may seem puzzling when artists are so quick to cry censorship when their works are criticized.  The tendency, however, speaks to this powerful role:  when the artist believes he’s bringing to society’s attention a shortcoming that needs redress, he’s bound to feel more defensive about his individual works.  When, in the face of criticism, artists reach for the First Amendment, it’s a clear sign that they’re trying to defend something more than just the paint on the canvas.

Because so much of contemporary art is distractingly divergent in form and content, it might be easier to relate to a “conscience” artist if there were one whose style reflected more traditional artistic forms.  There is.  One of the most popular artists of the twentieth century, in fact, provides a good example.

Norman Rockwell gained fame for his paintings of idyllic America and in much of his work he could be considered a consensus painter rather than a conscience painter.  But in the 1960s, he became more of the latter as he occasionally tackled society’s problems and attempted to act as a conscience.  His 1964 painting “The Problem We All Live With,” a moving work that portrays segregation and prejudice, was a far cry from the sentimental scenes of Americana that brought him fame.

If you can imagine how incensed people would be if Rockwell’s piece were removed from an exhibit so no one would be offended by it, you can begin to understand some of the more recent controversies.  Many artists believe their works are, in a way, supposed to offend people because that is what inevitably happens when light is shone on injustice.  All art isn’t like this of course, but these days a lot of it is, and when controversy erupts you can be sure “conscience” art is usually at the center.

originally published in the Waco Tribune-Herald, April 7, 2011

Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With, 1964, oil on canvas, Normal Rockwell Museum