Oppositional figures?

Art and law are ways of exploring, defining, and even creating the world. They are also often romanticized as methods of expressing opposition — opposition to the ruling order, opposition to the status quo, opposition to conventional wisdom. Princeton will soon be hosting a symposium on The Art of Opposition. The promotional materials state:

Throughout history artists have created works as a form of opposition, whether to a dominant political order or to familiar social mores and conventions. This polemical mode of conceiving and interpreting art continues: artists frequently present their own work as a challenge to the status quo, while scholars and critics of contemporary art reinforce the notion that for art to be relevant it must at some level present a critique of prevailing habits and attitudes. For art historians, the concept of art as a form of protest or a challenge to established convention remains a frequent point of departure for research, particularly in relation to certain artists or in the study of specific historical junctures.

Art too, of course, has a long history of reinforcing the status quo, of glorifying the powers-that-be. Virgil’s Aeneid is at least in significant part pro-Augustan propaganda. And you don’t exactly find the world’s greatest art (or most art) in the more pedestrian places. Patronage has its price.

Law as well has its long history of opposition. Our entire system of litigation is founded an adversarial process. More to the point, however, lawyers have often been at the forefront of progressive social movements. As in the case of artists, however, it is not skill and creativity that frees one from the mass of humanity, or even from the forces that crush the most noble parts of humanity. It is the use to which one puts that skill and creativity.