Abominable Ideas About Art #2: All Art is Political

The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll nail it down in brief, and create a graphic for each. New additions will be added at the top in new posts. Stay tuned.

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#2. All Art IS Political

All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo. ~ Toni Morrison

[NOTE: I’m a big fan of Morrison’s novels, but not this quote.]

Toni Morrison is just one of armies of people who have made this same claim. It’s everywhere, especially these days. Whenever anyone says “all art” we already know there’s an enormous problem: someone is trying to circumscribe art and lord themselves over art with a single definition. True, Morrison starts off with “all good art”, but then includes the rest when asserting even art that tries hard to not be political says “we love the status quo”. Elsewhere she’s said, “that’s what an artists is — a politician”. Ah, so the child who picks up a brush is instantly a politician. I see. For other quotes one can choose from over 37,000 hits on Google for the exact phrase “all art is political”, that’s how ingrained this idea is.

I remember when people used to say “all art is sexual”, or to quote Picasso, “sex and art are the same thing”. I thought that was bonkers when I heard it, and a bit pervy, but, alas, all has changed, and now all art is political. What we really see here is just that all art (and everything else) can be sexualized, or politicized, or seen through whichever narrow lens serves someone’s personal interests (Freudianism, Marxism, Feminism, religion, pure aesthetics…).

if you really pressed people who say all art is political, they’d probably admit that all fashion, cuisine, sports, horticulture, and everything else is political. They just see everything through a political lens. It’s their problem, not art’s. On top of this, it makes art into the rope in a tug-O-war between always opposing forces, and advocating for one side or another.

“All art is political” is the rallying cry of artists who make overtly political art, and it asserts that their art is the most important, that all art must play by their rules, and all art must serve their political agenda. This gets tied in with other overly simplistic notions, such as “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem”, and that’s how obviously non-political art gets looped in as political, as automatically part of the problem, or as Morrison put it, the status quo.

What does one do in the case of minimalism, where there’s no content at all to politicize (ex, a stack of bricks by Carl Andre)?

You politicize the act of creating minimalist art itself. But then, there’s no difference in your criticism between individual works, because you only have one blanket criticism which you attribute to all of minimalism.

The idea that all art is political comes bundled with a virus: all art is judged on its political merit in terms of a particular political agenda. Every artist is a cadre, and all art must serve the cause. The revolutionaries are the new critics, political allegiance their criterion, and the artists that don’t join ranks are the enemy who must be defeated.

The person who only sees politics when looking at art can’t see the art for what it actually offers, and places art in a subordinate role to politics as merely a vehicle or prop for whatever (always “progressive”) political cause.  Art which promotes the proper agenda is exalted, but any art, no matter how good, which takes a different political position, including none at all, is reviled. Here, art has no intrinsic merit of its own.

Sorry, zealots, but you don’t get to enlist all of art into your political revolution. A lot of art is AWOL, a conscientious objector, a celebration of pure beauty, about nature, religion, spirituality, exploring the imagination, or even dreaming in an opium trance… “All art is political” is such a grotesque exaggeration, that it might be more accurate to argue the opposite extreme, such as that all the best art succeeds irrespective of whatever political content. And if I had to choose one overstatement, it would definitely be the latter. The artist is an artist, and not a politician.

See also: Art is Not Inherently Political!

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#1. Making money is the highest form of art

We have Andy Warhol to thank for this nasty little gem.

To accept this you need to buy into two things. One is that making money is a form of art-making, and two is that it’s the most advanced level of art. Both are stinkers.

The hippies were closer to the truth than was Warhol. I can illustrate how ridiculous and insulting his idea is by changing one word: “good business is the best music“. Now, the sentiment doesn’t even make sense. Making money has nothing to do with music, and it has nothing to do with art, either.

Even if we are going to try to say that anything and everything is art, than why would business make better art than science, or saving lives, or landing on the moon? If making money is a form of art in the broadest sense of the word, it’s closer to the worst art.

In the same way you aren’t a musician if you don’t make some form of music, you aren’t an artist if you don’t make something creative that can at least be looked at. If making money is great art, so is making war.

Saying business is the best form of art is a bit it like saying greed is the most noble self-sacrifice. It’s shocking us with stupidity and hoping we mistake the shock for novelty and don’t question the stupidity.

[Extras. A meme, and a digital collage on the topic by yours truly.]

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To be continued…

~ Ends

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