The Politics of Art

Reviewing current art, both locally and globally, it appears that much of it has or purports to have a political content. One reason for this focus is that technological advances encourage snatching digitized fragments from reality that document the persistent global nightmare of human inhumanity. This process thus duplicates in art the same nightmare we see every day on TV or the Internet. Very little of this work, whose apology is that it is “consciousness raising,” amounts to more than superficial agitprop, often executed in the same slick style as the publicity and propaganda it presumably criticizes. http://www.brooklynrail.org/article_image/image/10400/rose-web1.jpg Portrait of Barbara Rose. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui.
There is the argument that all art is political because, however abstract, it inevitably expresses the values of a given culture or social class. Before the 19th century, artists understood they were being paid to create propaganda for the church, the state, or powerful figures that wished their images embellished and their status confirmed. All that changed when artists began making works that were not commissioned, leaving them free to be critical of the ruling class, its bloody wars and oppressive social practices. The price for this freedom, however, was marginalization, poverty, and in the more extreme cases, exile or incarceration. This is not a price contemporary Western “political” art has to pay, however, because it can be seamlessly absorbed into the existing institutions, including museums, commercial galleries, and auction houses where the work often ends up being bought by the same speculative interests it supposedly criticizes.

This painless integration into the cultural status quo is, moreover, the implicit objective of leading M.F.A. programs, which rather than developing “old fashioned” manual skills, teach budding artists how to thrive within this system. Thus the Whitney Biennial is but a step up from the Whitney