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THE ARTIST AND POLITICS (1954)1
BÜLEnt ECEVit
In our country, which has only recently passed through democracy’s
gates, people’s individuality and personhood have not yet begun to be
considered as a social problem. Most of the state authorities and politi-
cians refuse to consider the people for whom they are responsible as
psychological singularities, as entire and singular worlds unto them-
selves; or they feel no need to do so; or their cultural background and
their own interior depths do not allow them to acknowledge such a
need.
For most of them [the authorities], people exist as statistical fi g-
ures, or at most, nothing more than the crowd in the street.
In our country, we have not yet been able to eradicate the lingering
mindset of thousands of years of dictatorship, which gives no impor-
tance to the rights and interests of the individual alongside the inter-
ests of society; instead, society and the individual are treated as an
unconnected duality, where society is the birth child and the individual
is the stepchild, a mindset that may require much more time to fully
eradicate.
Politicians and state authorities will only feel the need to abandon
this mindset when a local citizenry compels them to do so.
As the number of people who are able to raise their voices above
1
First published in Turkish as “Sanatçı ve politika,” Ulus, Gennaio 11, 1954, 3.
© 2016 arTmargins and the massachusetts institute of Technology
doi:10.1162/arTm_a_00139
125
125
the noise of the crowd increases—those who, considered from a narrow
point of view, appear to reduce the interests of society to nothing,
instead doting upon the rights of the individual person—politicians’
and state authorities’ views, pure, will gain clarity. Individual members
of the crowd, which currently appears to the authorities as a nebulous
mass, will begin to stand apart from one another and come into focus.
In our country, it is writers and, in the broadest sense, artists, who
are best situated to begin to pressure politicians and state authorities in
Da questa parte.
The most significant proof of how effective artists can be in such a
process is the importance given in all dictatorships to placing artists
under heavy pressure. Such was the situation of artists in Nazi
Germany and in Soviet Russia!
Man, in all the breadth and depth of his psychological world, is the
artist’s primary subject and material. So much so that even psycholo-
gists and psychoanalysts follow the paths paved by artists, in the wake
of the traces they have (perhaps unconsciously) left behind.
There can be no democracy in countries where the artist is not
actively involved in politics. Because in those countries where the artist
is not involved in politics, not only those who govern, but also those
who are governed, are unable to learn what Humanity is, how to culti-
vate respect for Humanity in an abstract sense, and how to give it value
above all else in this world. Societies where this value is not given to
Humanity are not democratic.
Tr anslaTed by sar ah-neel smiTh
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