From 2006:
I’m not inclined to be forgiving of anyone who plays pattycake with totalitarianism, but if there’s been a truly great creative artist whose sins against humanity amounted to much more than first-degree talk, I’m unaware of it.
Mind you, I have no illusions about the ennobling power of art. I’ve spent too much time around artists not to know better than that. Daily megadoses of beauty won’t make you a better person unless you were a good person to begin with. What keeps great artists out of trouble is that they’re too busy making art to do much of anything but talk. It’s the second- and third-raters who end up working for the Ministry of Truth, where they burn off their frustrations by rejecting the grant applications of their betters (or sending them to concentration camps)….
Read the whole thing here.