The arts and politics
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Revision as of 00:56, 6 December 2010
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- art, politics, music and politics, aestheticization of violence, vandalism
- "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war". --Walter Benjamin via “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”
Political art includes anything from anarcho-punk to culture jamming, from political literature to social realism, from political cinema to protest art. The term artivist come to mind. Think the Notre-Dame Affair and The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution.
It is the opposite from art for art's sake.
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The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution
The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution is an unpublished text (1967) by by Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe
Throughout history, forms of art have gone through periodic abrupt changes called artistic revolutions. Movements have come to an end to be replaced by a new movement markedly different in striking ways. See also cultural movements.
Artistic revolution and cultural/political revolutions
The role of fine art has been to simultaneously express values of the current culture while also offering criticism, balance, or alternatives to any such values that are proving no longer useful. So as times change, art changes. If changes were abrupt they were deemed revolutions. The best artists have predated society's changes due not to any prescenience, but because sensitive perceptivity is part of their 'talent' of seeing.
Artists have had to 'see' issues clearly in order to satisfy their current clients, yet not offend potential patrons. For example, paintings glorified aristocracy in the early 1600s when leadership was needed to nationalize small political groupings, but later as leadership became oppressive, satirization increased and subjects were less concerned with leaders and more with more common plights of mankind.
Examples of revoutionary art in conjunction with cultural/political movements:
- Trotskyist & Diego Rivera
- Black Panther Party & Emory Douglas
- Cuban Poster Art
- Social realism & Ben Shahn
- Feminist art & the Guerrilla Girls
- Industrial Workers of the World & Woody Guthrie
Artistic revolution of style
But not all artistic revolutions were political. Revolutions of style have also abruptly changed the art of a culture. For example, when the careful, even tedious, art techniques of French neo-classicism became oppressive to artists living in more exuberant times, a stylistic revolution known as "Impressionism" vitalized brush strokes and color. Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir burst onto the French culture, effecting a revolution with a style that has become commonplace today.
An artistic revolution can be begun by a single artist, but unless that artist gains some understanding, he becomes an iconoclast. The first Abstract Expressionists were considered madmen to give up their brushes and rely on the sheer force of energy to leave an image, but then the import of atomic bombs, all atomic energy, became realized, and art found no better way of expressing its power. Jackson Pollock is the artist best known for starting that revolution.
Marx and ideology
During the mid-20th century art historians embraced social history by using critical approaches. The goal is to show how art interacts with power structures in society. One critical approach that art historians used was Marxism. Marxist art history attempted to show how art was tied to specific classes, how images contain information about the economy, and how images can make the status quo seem natural (ideology). Well-know Marxist art theorists include Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Arnold Hauser, and T.J. Clark.
See also
- Art and the French Revolution
- Anti-art
- Art, Truth and Politics, by Harold Pinter
- Minjung art
- Music and politics
- Political cinema
- Political satire
- Political theatre