Art and politics as arenas of human endeavor display various familiar intersections. Long about 1991, you couldn’t enter a gallery or go to a dance performance without receiving a slightly aestheticized lecture on AIDS or racism, and indeed the theory was bruited that all art is political, and all art criticism political analysis. From the other end, running for office or running the government involves a host of aesthetic activities, prosecuted with varying degrees of effectiveness, and Shepard Fairey’s Obama-Hope poster captured something of the essence of Obama’s intervention in American politics, both its potential to inspire and the sneaking suspicion that underneath was emptiness.

Indeed, every political regime uses the arts for propaganda purposes  (to read more…)