The Lamentable Politicization of Art
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The Lamentable Politicization of Art Michelle Marder Kamhi
Accepted: 31 August 2020 / # The National Association of Scholars 2020
Owing to length, my article “Art History Gone Amuck” (AQ, Fall 2020) omitted an important aspect: the uncritical acceptance of increasingly politicized art and interpretation. That is my subject here.
All Art Is Not Political The contemporary artworld has become so relentlessly politicized that it’s important to note how far it departs from millennia of art making. The notion that “all art is political” is now widely asserted as an incontrovertible truth by those on the left. It was the opening sentence of a 2019 article in the Atlantic by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the acclaimed musical Hamilton. And a decade earlier, novelist Toni Morrison had more pointedly insisted that “all good art is political.” Since both writers were mainly concerned with essentially literary art, there was some truth to their assertions. Fiction and drama almost invariably deal with human experience in a social context—which is likely to at least touch on politics, though not necessarily as the main point. In Jane Austen’s novels, for instance, the British system of entail and primogeniture inescapably affects the lives of her protagonists. But she was concerned as a novelist with showing how they act within those constraints—not with reforming the system. Qualities of character and human interaction are what matter most in her fictional world.
Michelle Marder Kamhi is an independent scholar and critic and co-edits Aristos, an online review of the arts. Her latest book is Bucking the Artworld Tide: Reflections on Art, Pseudo Art, Art Education & Theory (Pro Arte Books, 2020); www.mmkamhi.com.
M.M. Kamhi
Moreover, the claim that all art is political is totally false in the realm of visual art. Major categories of visual art—portraiture, landscape, and still life—do not deal with a social context at all, much less a political one. Nor is religious art political. The values embodied by these kinds of art are essentially metaphysical and moral, not political. In truth, the vast majority of traditional visual art is apolitical. Visual art can of course deal legitimately with politically charged subjects. Moving examples come to mind—from Francisco Goya’s Third of May (on which, see below) to work by the African American artist Charles White (the subject of a recent retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art), who should be better known than he is. But today’s politicized work largely falls short of succeeding, or even qualifying, as art. And higher education has become far more concerned with the political messages such work aims to convey than with how well or ill it succeeds as art.
Misinterpreting the Art of the Past Needless to say, the apolitical nature of most traditional visual art has not impeded the zealous pursuit of hidden messages of oppression. Some years ago, an earnest curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, informed viewers that the charming late-nineteenth-centu
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