art: politics & value

so that the art experience is replaced by the excitement of peering at inaccessible capital.

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.

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

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

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

In our time, this cult is fed by corporate gold-and-masterpiece shows,

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.

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.

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?