In a recent post at the Los Angeles Times’ “Culture Monster” blog, Christopher Knight calls conservatives to naught for their responses to Michelle and Barack Obama’s choice of art for the White House–in particular, for their choice of this piece: Alma Thomas’ Watusi (Hard Edge) (1963). A handful of conservative bloggers implied or claimed outright that the work was a fraud–a plagiarized version of Matisse’s L’Escargot (1953)–and argued that the White House should have known better than to hang such a piece in America’s most prestigious residence.

Knight correctly points out that such an accusation shows a profound lack of knowledge of twentieth century art. While Thomas is a minor figure in American art, her work nevertheless shows great technical skill and a nuanced response to past styles and themes. Borrowing, cutting and pasting, and parody are touchstones of the avant-garde. Thomas’ Byzantine-inspired abstractions are, to my mind, more interesting than the late Watusi piece, but the Obamas’ choice of the Watusi is far from controversial.

The conservative response to the choice highlights a major weakness in contemporary conservatism–and that is its approach to culture. Following a number of recent conservative thinkers, Matthew Milliner, in a pair of articles for Public Discourse, calls on conservatives to drop exactly this overly dismissive and often unknowledgeable treatment of contemporary art. Instead of “lionizing the classics and lamenting the decline of Western culture” Milliner writes, conservatives need to begin to “engage the culture of our time.” “Should conservatism wish to become a cultural force,” he continues, “it will require consciously resisting the natural tendency to bifurcate culture and politics. Culture captures hearts and minds often so much more successfully than does an argument–something the Left knows well.”

The Watusi dust-up, however, also highlights the antagonism that conservatives face in the contemporary art world. In Knight’s response to his conservative counter-parts, for example, he is unable to suppress his disdain for them. He characterizes a Free Republic blogger as “gloating” and Michelle Malkin as “shrieking.” Yet, while there is some ill-advised gloating in the Free Republic post, there is little shrieking in Malkin’s, which is characterized more by a befuddled amusement.

Knight, furthermore, refers to conservatives as “wingnuts,” “right-wing screamers” and, somewhat strangely, people with “cloven fingertips.” Ostensibly, Knight uses these terms to refer to the bloggers in question, but the terms clearly encompass mainstream conservative critics as well–in particular, critics of a recent NEA conference call in which Yosi Sargant, then director of communications for the NEA, called on artists in vague but highly suggestive language to support the President’s legislative agenda through art. Following Artnet’s Ben Davis, Knight dismisses conservatives’ very serious concerns regarding this call and the possible use of a federal agency for partisan ends. While there is no doubt that a number of conservative personalities have showed themselves to be anything but civil, the art world itself can also be rather uncivil to conservatives, though often in a less visible way.

Milliner notes that one reason conservatives are, for the most part, uninterested in contemporary art is they rightfully perceive it to be dominated by a leftist radicalism. For Milliner, however, political radicalism–whether from the left or the right–has rarely, if ever, been good for art. Thus, while he notes the resilience of “[p]rogressive art theorists,” he concludes: “The avant-garde is tired, retreating–as Susan Sontag did toward the end of her career–to the base camp of beauty.”

Whether Milliner is right or not remains to be seen, but given the examples of Knight and Davis, that retreat might be long indeed. Such a move back to beauty would require a shift as major as the rejection of orthodox Christianity in the West in favor of an epistemological relativism to which much of twentieth century avant-garde art was, and still is, indebted.

Yet, if such a shift is ever to take place, it must take place in the arts at the same time as it takes place outside of the arts. While artists respond to changes in the culture, they are also some of the first individuals to create such changes. The American poet , for example, who was also a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before he died in 1966, once wrote that his “fragile” poems could be like a “seashell” or “a great Courbet,” bending “the ear of the outer world.” O’Hara’s work was at first dismissed as merely charming. Now, in part due to a better understanding of his poetry, but also in part due to changing social mores, his work has grown in stature.

Without reducing art to a mere political tool, the fact is art shapes culture. It bends “the ear of the outer world,” often long before that bending becomes apparent.

Contemporary conservatives have missed this bus entirely. Instead of nurturing the arts in a way in which artists and poets are naturally exposed to some of conservatism’s more profound ideas, and, therefore, again, in a natural and unprogrammatic way, create works that “bend the ear of the outer world,” they have come to rely entirely on think tanks and elected officials to do the bending.

This is a grave error. For, when it comes to a war between art and politics, in the long run, art always wins.

Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Louisiana College.