What if I, seeing the pictures on your fridge, and unaware that a child had created them, gushed to you how much I loved the biting critique of the conservationist establishment putting cute and cuddly plants and animals against the real and present problems facing real estate development in suburban areas. Certainly the artist had nothing like that in mind when they created it, but to me the art is clearly making a political statement.
Like sh1bu1 said, at that point you’ve rendered the term “political” meaningless by making it apply to everything.
Have I?
The idea that all art is political grew up in the twentieth century among Marxist Leninists. Nevertheless, Karl Marx loved ancient Greek literature, and read it in the original Greek. Ancient Greek literature accepted slavery.
Literature can have a political message. The novels of Ayn Rand come to mind. Other authors, such as Upton Sinclair wrote novels with left wing messages. These are somewhat exceptional, however.
The first challenge of art is to attract an audience. I do not see how a love for classical music is inconsistent with any political philosophy or set of attitudes.
I’d offer to sell them to you. And suggest that I may be able to source others from the same yet-to-be-famous artist.
I’ll do my best to tackle this from the perspective of the art I know best: Poetry.
One of the things about poetry isn’t so much what you say as what you don’t. Not so much what form you use as what forms you don’t. The writing of a poem is in many ways the creation of a whole bunch of negatives: What you left out.
So, you write a poem. You can’t help but write the poem you can write rather than writing the poem someone else could write. Your poem may not encompass all of your reality, but it definitely doesn’t encompass all of someone else’s. If you are from the US, your poem will have the US in it because your use of language is built of your exposures and your environment. Too, your choice to use free verse rather than making a sonnet is a reflection of something. Even if you say it wasn’t a choice, that perhaps you didn’t know how to make a sonnet to start with, it’s still reflecting something. And it’s usually more than just sort of falling into a specific form of writing. There are past influences and extant beliefs about the nature of poetry that come into play: formalism, neo-formalism, confessional, LangPo, pomo, surrealists, etc. All of these are active AND reactive schools of poetry, each one playing off the others. Each choice you make to put down a single word, then, starts blocking out other schools of thought, starts whittling down the number of journals you could be published in. Even not knowing better doesn’t stop this from playing out.
Okay, so the poem is reflective in some way of the author, even if we choose to take the words as completely independent of the author’s intent (some critics do so saying that each reader brings meaning to the words, and others take a more holistic approach to criticism, where the author’s meaning is inherent in the words based on intentions) we can still regard the poem as an artifact of a particular person inside a particular culture inside a particular society. Even when you attempt to write a poem that somehow escapes your culture, that very attempt at escape is a political act. The poem is, in short, the product of your life and there is no way for the product of your life to escape the political.
Now, I do separate art from doodling (or the equivalents). When I’m talking to a customer on the phone and doodling on my page, sometimes I’m not even looking at the page itself. But that’s kind of the beauty of this argument. Choosing not to look is still a choice, and all choice reflects the person which reflects the world.
All that said, I agree that art is political. I think everything humans do is, in some way, political. Aardvarks are a bit less political, but if you see an aardvark in the zoo? Political.
So, why say art is political? Because the point is that we, and therefore our art, cannot be devoid of context. We are creations of our cultures, with all of the pluses and minuses that go along with that. Most of us like to think of ourselves as floating along, bias-free and rational when really we are essentially built of a huge number of experiences all jumbled together in a mish-mash of science and superstition and bias and logic and emotion that anchors us within a culture and denies us some sort of universality.
All politics is local. All art is local, too.
The two most “arty” artists I know have always maintained that art is strictly emotional, not communicating anything except raw feeling. By their criteria, even something like Picasso’s Guernica should be judged only by how much it kicks you in the gut, not by whether it affects your opinion about the Spanish Civil War.
Of course, that can merge directly into the concept that “the personal is political,” which puts you right back where you started.
When I’ve heard people say “all art is political”, what they mean is that even seemingly non-political ways of engaging with art contain within them political subtexts. For example, most of the classic works of European art were produced for an aristocratic audience. How much of our sense of what constitutes a “great” work is determined by how closely the work allows us to replicate an aristocratic engagement with art – elitist, refined, exclusionary? How much of contemporary museum culture is driven by a bourgeois desire to emulate the oppressor class – to create public “palaces” that echo the artistic experience of dead kings and princes?
The phrase “all art is political” is less a claim and more of a koan. It’s a way to get you to start thinking about how creative and aesthetic experiences are shaped by power relations. And to get you to consider that even the idea of a pure aesthetic response (one that is devoid of class influence) is *itself *a critical stance that is only achievable within a cocoon of aristocratic or bourgeois privilege.
If all art is political, is all art equally political?
That is very nicely said.
Yeah! So bias-free and rational that it reached universality! 
That’s a very insightful post, jsgoddess.
I consider myself a crafter, although technically I’m an artist. I suppose the reason why I feel more comfortable calling myself a crafter is because I feel that my creations are devoid of meaning or interpretation. They are functional decoratives and nothing more. But I’ve never stopped to think that choosing to make functional art is actually a statement, of sorts. Or that by using previously used materials (tin cans, baby food jars, discarded terra cotta pots, etc.) that I’m also infusing meaning into what I create–or recreate. I make what I do in a particular way, with some kind of code behind it. And I distribute it in a certain fashion, too. That makes it all political.
I was going to say the complete opposite. Seems to me literature tends to be very political, since it deals directly with people and their relations with each other. Just because the author may or may not be advancing a discrete position through his or her characters does not mean that those characters are not playing out politics. It’s hard to see the politics in an abstract Picasso. But you’d have to be blind and illiterate not to see politics in books like “Rubyfruit Jungle”, “The Bluest Eye”, “The Grapes of Wrath”, “Native Son”, “The Stand”, “The Scarlet Letter”, or “A Clockwork Orange”. Or even something as soft as “Harry Potter”.
Yes, even politics abound even in that world. The enslaved house elves were not sympathetic creatures on accident. Nor was it an accident that the “good guys” embraced diversity while the “bad guys” did not. Harry Potter could have also been a female; JK Rowling’s choice to make him male was political (boys will not read a story about a girl). But you can also tell that Rowling had concern about representing witches to be just as competent, but with the same potential for evil, as the wizards. I don’t know much about Rowling, but I’m betting she’s a fairly progressive person, tolerant of multiculturalism and non-conforming personalities and lifestyles. I might be wrong, of course, but the content of her writing definitely paints that picture.
So I would say, above all art forms, literature is the most political. And a brief look at history would show this. I don’t recall there ever being mass burnings of Impressionist paintings or classical composition scores. But every generation sees a new list of banned books from school libraries. That says something right there.
That’s a charitable way of putting it. I on the other hand would say that the phrase “all art is political” is itself political; its purpose is to convince you that works are political when they are not. It’s part of the “civilization is a huge conspiracy” view of things. It’s to convince you that no one can ever like or make a work of art just because it’s pretty; there has to be an agenda behind it. If calenders with nature scenes sell well in Africa, it’s because of the White Male Agenda*, not because humans are wired to find nature pretty. That sunset has an agenda.
- Insert another Vast Conspiracy as needed
Then you and I are making 2 differnet statements.
I am saying that not all art is created with a political viewpoint.
You are saying a person can read politics into anything be it a mural on a wall in a crime ridden area, ducks and bunnys on a fridge, or the smear of bird shit on a car.
In the case of the second statement, yes anyone trying hard enough can read viewpoints into a work the artist never intended. see here
Art is a function of taste and aesthetics of opinion, if all art is politics, and politics is considered a kind of science, and science is defined by the scientific method which is a function of testing for facts then all art is a product of the scientific method.
Therefore opinions are facts, and I submit all my opinions are factually correct. It’s a fact that mayonnaise is disgusting and no civilized person would use it.
Well, the phrase “all art is political” is absolutely a political statement, and I doubt that very few of the people who would utter it would disagree with that claim.
However, I would disagree that it’s a claim of a conspiracy, or that all artists have political agendas. Rather I’d argue that it’s an acknowledgment that artistic creation and consumption don’t take place in a vacuum. The art that gets made is the art that gets paid for, either by the mass market or patronage. All of our aesthetic experiences are mediated by our social context. Why do people wear jackets to the symphony and tee-shirts to heavy metal shows? Is it possible that often we choose aesthetic experiences not solely because they’re entertaining to us, but also because they are part of how we construct our social and political identities? If someone says he’s a classical music fan, that carries certain social and political overtones. It’s an expensive taste, old-fashioned, complicated, sophisticated, nuanced, aristocratic, European. You hear classical music in the background of commercials for luxury cars, not at tea party rallies. There’s not a conspiracy to make classical music = upper class, but the pattern of signification still exists.
Yes. In poetry, New Formalism has taken on a very conservative persona–not too surprising considering the inherent “conservatism” in formalism, but these are poets we’re talking about here. This conservative aspect influences who decides to publish where (there are journals I would not submit work to, f’rinstance) and even poets reacting so strongly against the political slant that they don’t choose to write in received forms at all despite liking to do so.
One thing about poetry is that there’s so little money in it it makes it easier to see what people actually want to do versus what makes them a buck. Note: I don’t think this is really a good thing for the art.
I guess I don’t see the problem. A huge part of the fun for me is seeing all the preconceptions, the notions and perspectives that people bring to art, especially when I’m looking at it going, it’s a can of soup, what’s the deal.
Totally! This is my problem. I can lift my eyebrows at others preconceptions,:dubious: but I have no talent for assigning my own perspective to it. One reason I am enjoying this class is to see what it is exactly I am missing. Some of it I still don’t get but I still don’t get differential calculus either.
You people are using normal human standards of language to address the OP, but remember that this is academia.
Here’s the deal…
Art is a means of communication. It’s message may be interpreted differently by different people, but the same is true of any form of communication. The artist is making a statement and trying to impact his audience in some way.
That’s pretty much the same definition as politics. It is communication between humans intended to alter each others’ thinking and/or actions.
You can say pretty much the same thing about any form of human interaction. You could say baseball is politics too with equal validity.
I say this as someone with a degree in political science. I believe this is pretty much the first time that I have been called upon to directly use my my book learned political science knowledge, and I’m over 50!
Personally I think politics are defined this way so political scientists can claim dominion over the study of all human interactions. But it overlaps with a whole lot of other fields, particularly sociology and communications, and apparently, art.