Everything, we’re told, is political.
Food is political, according to the late, great Anthony Bourdain, who said, in the words of the New Yorker, that ingredients “tell a story of migration and conquest.” Altruism is political, too. At this year’s People’s Choice Awards, singer Pink announced, “Kindness today is an act of rebellion.”
And art, as critics have raged for years, is nothing if not a political force. In the Atlantic’s December issue, Lin-Manuel Miranda offered an account of “The Role of the Artist in the Age of Trump.” If the role of the artist changes depending on who sits at the Resolute desk, does that make art inherently tied to politics? Apparently so.
“All art,” Miranda assures us, “is political.” The premise is one that Miranda takes little effort to defend. And to justify himself to his peers, he doesn’t have to. Artists of all stripes have been arguing as much for years.
“All good art is political!” author Toni Morris declared more than a decade ago. “There is none that isn’t.”
One of George Orwell’s collections of mid-20th-century essays appears under the proclamation, All Art is Propaganda. The title might seem to bolster Miranda’s claims about the “politics inherent within a piece of art.” But people haven’t always seen art as a form of proselytism.
Prior to the mid-20th century, it was common to speak of “art for art’s sake.” Nineteenth-century writer and critic Theophile Gautier defined the phrase as “the pursuit of pure beauty — without any other preoccupation.” If beauty and utility are distinguishable, as some critics and philosophers argued, art for art’s sake makes sense: Something can’t be truly beautiful if it also serves a purpose.
But if artists told themselves that they could create a painting or a book that was merely beautiful without communicating some message, they deluded themselves. In Writings from the Late Notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche describes art for art’s sake as a “dangerous principle.” Before the turn of the century, French novelist George Sand, a vocal socialist, agreed. “Art for art’s sake is an empty phrase,” she wrote. “Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.”
Artists strove to use their work for their own ends, but even when bombs began raining down on Europe, the pursuit of pure aesthetic didn’t seem entirely futile, argues George Orwell in The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda.
“You might be individually fortunate or unfortunate, but you had inside you the feeling that nothing would ever fundamentally change,” he wrote of the climate leading up to, and including, World War I. “It is that feeling of continuity, of security” that allowed critics such as George Saintsbury, “a real old crusted Tory and High Churchman, to be scrupulously fair to books written by men whose political and moral outlook he detested.”
After the Second World War, everything changed. “The writers who have come up since 1930 have been living in a world in which not only one’s life but one’s whole scheme of values is constantly menaced,” Orwell wrote. “In such circumstances, detachment is not possible. You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat.”
Nearly 75 years removed from the greatest global conflict the world has ever seen, this awareness of strife, of partisanship, of the potential for the world as we know it to change, seems only to have grown. In fact, Orwell’s next paragraph could very well apply today, especially as America’s political poles often assail each other not as the Right and the Left, but with labels such as “fascist” and “socialist.”
“In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take sides, and his feelings had to find their way not only into his writing but into his judgements on literature,” Orwell wrote. “Literature had to become political, because anything else would have entailed mental dishonesty. One’s attachments and hatreds were too near the surface of consciousness to be ignored. What books were about seemed so urgently important that the way they were written seemed almost insignificant.”
In this sense, Miranda is right that all art is political. It has become so. Lena Waithe, the screenwriter for the upcoming film Queen & Slim, which highlights police brutality, says artists aren’t doing their jobs if they’re not angering President Trump. “I hope the president tweets about” the film, she told Vanity Fair.
Even if art carries a political element, though, exclaiming that “all art is political” isn’t likely to make it any better. In fact, an overemphasis on the details of daily politics will make it worse.
More than 50 years after her death, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories still endure in English classes across America, perhaps because she was political only by accident. Professor and O’Connor scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson told me O’Connor’s secret was not getting too trapped in her own time.
After the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, Eudora Welty wrote Where is the Voice Coming From?, which Wilson describes as a “short story that almost reads like propaganda” since “it was just an emotional response to a tragic situation.” Few people read the story today.
“O’Connor, instead, wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge, which is a story that has lasted more than Welty’s piece, no matter how great of a writer Welty was because it tries to situate things in the human element,” Wilson says. “She’s always writing fiction in such a way that it gets to the very bottom of things.”
The idea that art is political may not be wholly wrong, but its greatest flaw is the way this philosophy seems to minimize art, embracing a narrow view of its purpose. Its goal should not simply be to fight Trump or the next president. It should be to say something about us as humans, past, present, and future.
If art can’t reach that fundamental level, it won’t say much about humanity. And it will certainly have nothing to say about politics.
