Art & Understanding

Our friend Glenn Sanders has created a cool blog in celebration of political art. Called "Political Poster: The Art of the Campaign," Glenn's collecting images related to the current presidential election, posters for-and-against both tickets.

I touched on the subject of political art in a prior post, but in light of the rapidly expanding body of work related to the 2008 campaign, wanted to offer some additional thoughts on the subject.

Politically-themed art is designed to provoke; to offer ideas and stimulate thinking. To agitate on behalf of a person or position. It uses a simple visual language to communicate vast notions. It reflects culture's zeitgeist. But it also, obviously, intends to shape it.

In the excellent blog "Running Yellow Lights," its author discusses the weaknesses inherent in political art:

"Art runs into problems when it stops trying to answer questions of what values we should hold and instead answers how we should get there. Art can tell us it’s a bad thing people are poor; it cannot tell us whether the government can fix it. Art can tell us to consider divinity; it cannot tell us to support churches with the state.

"Believing art can have any impact on whether we should end a specific war or support free market capitalism misses this point entirely... Art cannot reasonably answer political questions. It can sway political questions as to the values one should fight for, such as the what and the why. Through more effective means we can answer the questions of the whether, the how, and the how much... The communicative role of art is essential and important in the way we may form values, but it should never grasp pretensions of being better than empirics and logic in defining the feasibility of the means that may emerge from the values."

A gorgeous way of saying: do not rely on the simplistic idealization of issues to form your opinions. Posters just frame the question; your actual political views should not fit on a t-shirt. The road to change is not a slogan: it requires the hard work of understanding.