Brett Olson

work accumulates “value” and becomes, ipso facto, harmless. As far as today’s politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.

We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his

Mass media took away the political speech of art. When Picasso painted Guernica, regular TV broadcasting had been in existence for only a year in England and nobody in France, except a few electronics experts, had seen a television set.

their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must be in a mass media society where art’s principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion.

Eero Saarinen as the “Gateway to the West” in St. Louis, Missouri.

Still-life, after all, was the chief image of private property in Western art.

An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent,

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks only to please and amuse, and succeeds?

Grosz and Heartfield, as line soldiers during the war, would also send one another postcards on which they had made small, satirical montages whose point, not being verbal, was easily overlooked by the military censors.