mackerelmint wrote: ↑Wed May 09, 2018 12:44 pm
But not all art is political. The two things are completely separable. For your argument to be valid, that would have to be not the case, and while I'm sure we can both agree that it's abysmal stuff to look at, I submit to you one Thomas Kinkade. As for "cherrypicking tastes without having experienced it", I submit literally every "gold star" homo on earth. In extending your argument, they can't know they're gay unless they've had the fruit from the opposite tree, which is obviously horse shit. I can accept that you experience art as being political, but is that the objective truth, here? You think that mayyyyybe other people experience that differently, and you're just invalidating experiences by calling that dishonest? We're talking about a very subjective thing, here, art, after all. But if you can explain to me how this:
is somehow political and make a cogent case for it, I'll consider the possibility that you haven't crawled completely up your own asshole about this.
Or does something HAVE to be political in order to be art, according to you?
There are two things I feel you're going to have to accept in order to accept my claim: first you have to accept that "politics" doesn't refer only to the governmental body of a country (like the US government), but relationships and their frameworks (class, race, gender, religion, family, social events, business, etc.) that generally have one group with power over another; second is that art is a symptom or byproduct of the culture in which it is created. If you don't accept either of these fundamental hypotheses (you know, which is fine), then I think you'll have trouble accepting that all art is political. Obviously, politics are fully part and parcel to any form of modern culture, so logic follows that art as a byproduct of it's culture is, necessarily, political. That's the short version.
Now I don't know much about Kinkade's work other than I don't really like it because of how saccharine it is. But, I would argue that there
is a reason in which he felt compelled, or liked, to paint them (as well as why people like them, but that's a whole other tangent). Sure, money helps for his reasoning. Aside from that, perhaps the easiest caveat on any art is that art is a response to what came before it (Dadaism is a really great example of this). I don't study Kinkade, but I imagine he places himself in some sort of relationship to the art that came before him or the contemporary art that surrounds him. Maybe he is deliberately commercial, and who knows, trying to be apolitical, which come on, definitely
is political. Obviously Kinkade's art isn't as heavy handed as this thread's subject, but I'm not arguing degrees. I'm also not going to try and make an interpretation of that painting, because, well, I don't want to.
That being said, I can qualify this a little more in saying my argument is influenced by what has been studied historically.
Bear with me here.
Take a look at the movie Shakespeare in Love: one particular scene has Shakespeare sitting on a couch, being analyzed by psychoanalyst quite similar to how Freud would later be practicing roughly 300 years later. This is an example of a major anachronism (and anachronisms have upset many recent scholars who I'm using as part of my argument) but not just because Freud wasn't born yet. It's because people of the Renaissance were literally unable of thinking that way. You had the church and a communal people that lived for the church and for pure survival by depending on each other. There was no "individual" that existed for Freud to study even if he had a time traveling device to use. This is a major reason why Martin Luther's Theses were such a big deal, because they actually started to get people to have their own relationship with their god: “The Lutheran soteriology demolishes the intellectual framework and instinctual basis of the communal soteriology which saw Christendom as the historical incarnation. Now man struggled alone with his eternal destiny”* . Hell, people at this time didn't even
read by themselves yet alone think of have a "self"*. Granted, the Theses were posted before Shakespeare was born, but it wasn't until after Shakespeare's death around a hundred years later did the famous "I think therefore I am" statement come from Rene Descartes, which is the exact opposite of a communal thought.
But, (and this is where it gets cool, I swear) Descartes at the time that he was writing the famous line wasn't the only one pushing the boundary over to the individual from the communal. Poet John Donne was doing the same thing in a completely different country right at the same time. His poem "
The Sun Rising" is an early example of solipsism (which is very much an "individual" frame of thinking). To emphasize this even further, neither Descartes or Donne read each other's work. So
something had to push them to do it (something being the dawn of the Enlightenment). Oh, and John Donne at the time his poem was written, was trying to pickup girls (hence his nickname Jack the Rake). So, like Kinkade's bad painting, he
probably was not trying to be political. But, it turns out that it really was, regardless.
That's just one example of how culture (and by nature politics) are inseparable from art. I think if you accept this, it's even easier to accept that art also influences culture, creating a reciprocal relationship.
Anyway, I tried to convince you.
*
A History of Private Life, Volume III by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby (1989)
