Crash Course: Political Theory

Beyonc.

Kendrick Lamar.

Greta Gerwig.

Megan Thee Stallion.

Boots Riley.

Chappell Roan.

Childish Gambino.

They all make art thats not just fun or entertaining or dance-able.

They make art thats political.

And making political art can make people [drum roll] pretty mad.

But despite constantly being told to stay in your lane by political and anonymous commenters alike, they keep on doing it.

They keep making art that interrogates our history and issues of the day.

So why do people make political art?

And can you even have art without politics?

Hi!

I'm Ellie Anderson and this is Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] My journey started, once again, with our old friend Plato.

Remember his vision for a political utopia?

It would be led by someone whos moral, intellectual, and yearns for truth what he called a philosopher king. Not to be confused with the other kings, burger and short, who have different priorities.

But Plato also talks about the role of art in a political utopia, and his thinking there was split.

He thought of both art and politics as a kind of craft, an acquired skill.

On one hand, you had statecraft, the domain of the rational mind.

It involves exercising capital-R Reason in governing a citizenry.

Art, on the other hand, was emotional, promoting, as Plato put it, weeping, laughter, and effeminacy. Poetry feeds and waters the passions and desires, he writes.

She lets them rule instead of ruling them. Plato calls this tension between rational philosophy and emotional art the ancient quarrel. Which is also what I call my internal dialogue about when to do the dishes.

Plato was pro-philosophy, but he wasnt totally anti-art.

He actually loved the arts!

Especially poetry he was a Homer superfan.

And he thought that art could be used for the good of the state like poems extolling the virtues of famous men, and music that pumps up warriors for battle.

But Plato also worried that art might be too powerful in shaping public consciousness.

Pumping up warriors with a sick beat is one thing, but if art distracts us from reality and fills our heads with what he called a mere imitation of the truth, well, thats where the danger lies.

If you have too much emotion, you wont have any room for reason, and he thought the philosopher king needed to keep this power in check.

So, yeah, thats a bit of an extreme take.

But Plato did identify something important: that art can be used for and against politics.

Ever since, people have seized on this idea and not always with the best intentions.

Like, hmmm, who do I know who famously used art as propaganda?

Yep, thats my Nazi detector.

Its 1930s Germany, and were in the land of the National Socialist German Workers' Partyor the Nazi Party.

Like Plato, they recognized that art could be used to shape cultural and political identity, and they had a very particular idea of what German identity should be.

It was a booming time for cultural expression, with developments in Dadaism, Expressionism, modernist architecture and design, and cabaret culture.

But the Nazi regime thought this kind of art had no place in the Aryan society they were trying to create.

So in 1937, the Nazi regime confiscated thousands of these works from German galleries and private collections.

But before they got rid of it, they wanted everyone to know exactly what kind of deranged, un-German art they considered unacceptable.

So, they displayed it!

The Degenerate Art exhibit included works by celebrated artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

It was all crammed together like an old thrift store, with the intention of making it hard to appreciate the artistry.

Oh, and kids werent allowed inway too corruptible.

At the same time, they set up another exhibit right around the corner, called The Great German Art Exhibition.

This one featured works made by Nazi-approved German artists who depicted a traditional, conservative aesthetic pre-industrial farm scenes, classical nudes, World War I imagery.

But this tactic backfired: the Degenerate Art exhibit was seen by nearly two million visitors, more than three and a half times the boring, traditional German art exhibit.

If youve ever been on the internet, youll be unsurprised to hear that folks are always gonna want to see the controversial stuff.

To really get your political propaganda to the masses through art, though, the Nazis figured that youve gotta go where the common man goesthe movie theater.

Lets go to the tape.

[TV static] In one instance, Nazi leaders hired Leni Riefenstahl to create the infamous film Triumph of the Will. The nearly two-hour, black-and-white film placed triumphant scoring over footage of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.

It was an event in large part staged for the camera, and Riefenstahl edited the footage to make Hitler and his Nazis look so powerful that their takeover seemed all but inevitable.

It was used to lift up the state and inspire the so-called warriors just like Plato imagined.

[TV static] Fortunately, it wasnt all Nazi propaganda, all the time.

I found that other German artists were still making art, despite the risk of intimidation, violence, and the whole degenerate thing.

It turns out they maintained their own thoughts about what made art political, which basically fell into two camps: art is political for what it says, and art is political for what it doesnt say.

Were about to get a little heady.

Im gonna need some coffee.

[Ellie scoffs] [Coffee sloshing] Heres the deal with those two camps I mentioned.

The first camp argued for making art thats explicitly used as an instrument of politics what they called Committed Art.

This is art where the political agenda is front and center the stuff you look at and say, yeah, I know what side that persons on. A lot of this work grew out of the artistic period that Hitler and his henchmen were so against the Dadaism, Expressionism, etc.

that I mentioned before, which collectively made up the Weimar Era cultural renaissance.

My favorite example of this is German playwright Bertolt Brechts most famous work, the Threepenny Opera, a searing portrayal of a capitalist society run amok, where just about anyone would do just about anything for money.

But Brechts take on political playwriting went beyond the storyline of his plays.

He experimented with techniques like having actors step out of character to lecture viewers, or designing the stage to show lights and ropes that are usually hidden.

He called this the alienation effect. The goal was to interrupt the audiences emotional involvement in a play and get them to take what he called a socialist realist perspective instead essentially, to think critically about the constructs that exist in their own, real-life environment.

Like, whats hidden just offstage in your life?

How can we shine metaphorical lights on the metaphorical ropes that are holding up systems of power in reality?

Where was I?

Oh, two camps of political artists, right.

The second camp didnt want their art to address politics directly.

German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that the most politically effective art was also the most challenging, obscure, and avant-garde the stuff that really pushes the envelope.

He believed that radical artistic experimentation was far more politically potent than overtly political art, like the explicitly Marxist art Brecht was making, because it was resistant to everything, even interpretation.

[Pouring coffee] This is the Autonomous Art approach.

Art becomes political by refusing to engage with politics and maintaining its independence from human spheres.

But it turns out that these two approaches are far from the only ways that art does politics.

Another thinker of the time, Walter Benjamin, pointed out that we tend to mythologize art and set itapart from the rest of the world, making us susceptible to manipulation by propaganda.

So, in Benjamins view, the solution is to democratize art.

Well, more like Marx-icize art.

If we can reproduce art, then we can deprive it of its capacity to forge some grand narrative.

And heres the thing: these debatesabout if and how art should be politicalcarry on today.

Which brings us back to the present where my heads still spinning.

Maybe Ive been asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question isnt whether art should be political its clear from our journey through time that it is, one way or another.

Maybe its a matter of approaching a piece of art on its own terms, and asking what it has to say about our world.

Lets take one more stop, in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.

Once, Richmond was home to more confederate statues than any other city in the US.

Which made it a hotbed for a pressing debate around how art commemorates American figures and which figures get to become heroes.

Confederate statues enshrine a particular narrative about how the Civil War should be remembered like, that it really wasnt about slavery, and that the South only lost because the North had more resources, an idea often called the lost cause narrative. And in recent decades, Confederate monuments have become symbols of an ongoing political battle over whose stories take the spotlight, and what America doesand shouldstand for.

But one artist is fighting statueswith statues.

In 2019, Kehinde Wiley, the famed painter of Barack Obamas presidential portrait, crafted a twenty-seven-foot-tall sculpture of a man triumphantly poised upon a battle-ready steed He installed it at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, right near Richmonds infamous Monument Avenue.

It looks in many ways just like the monuments that once lined that streethuge, imposing, bronze.

But the man depicted in this statue is Black, and hes got way better style than those Confederate generals.

Wileys artwork transforms a public space that for more than a century was home to a very different vision of Americas past and present.

This sculpture doesnt state its politics in words, but its message is clear.

So heres where Ive landed for now: art and politics are less like oil and water, and more like peanut butter and jelly: they do a lot separately, but theyre often found between the same pieces of bread.

Is anybody else feeling hungry?

The Beyoncs and Greta Gerwigs of the world might not be running for office yet.

But their art does so many things like expand the imagination, challenge social conceptions, and evoke emotional responses to real-world issues.

And all of that changes the way we think about, talk about, and do politics.

Art informs how we see the world how we believe things work, how we think they should work, and what pathways we see as possible for whom.

Next time, well wrap up our time together by asking one more big question: