Aesthetics of politics

It feels like ages ago since Dean Kissick published his controversial article, “The Painted Protest,” in Harper’s. At the time, the reaction was swift and critical — mostly, I think, because the Democrats had recently lost another election to Trump. People were upset and the gut response to Kissick’s measured criticism of the overtly political nature of contemporary art served as a form of self-soothing for many reactionaries.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the way culture has shifted over the past decade, Kamala Harris’s loss wasn’t much of a surprise — nor was the Harper’s piece. It’s all part of the vibe shift that Sean Monahan identified when he first coined the term in his 2021 Substack article of the same name.

With a little distance from the electoral calendar, it seems like a good time to revisit Kissick’s piece with a clearer head.

I agree in broad strokes with the Harper’s piece, but in my opinion, there is an important semantic distinction to be made. Kissick — and the artists he criticizes — interpret “politics” too narrowly. Politics as political activism ruins art, but art is always inherently political because aesthetics is inherently political, in a general sense.

Jacques Rancière argued this most clearly in his book The Politics of Aesthetics where he explains that aesthetics deals with “regimes of visibility.” What we are allowed to see and what artists are allowed to represent are based on a reigning set of conditions, which are themselves inherently political. It’s a more subtle form of politics that can’t be subsumed into mere partisanship or political activism.

Take a simple example of classic European architecture with doors between each and every room, or the kitchen hidden away from guests. By tearing down walls to create homes with open-floor concept, we rearrange what Rancière would call the “distribution of the sensible,” bringing the homemaking aspect of one’s private life into full view of guests. This inherently changes the politics of privacy.

In visual art, there was a traditional hierarchy of subject matter in classic European painting. History painting, portraiture, genre painting, landscape, still life. By simple fact of painting the working class in “Les Raboteurs de Parquet,” Gustave Caillebotte engages in an inherently political act. Not because it makes a normative statement about how we should think about the role of labor and class, but by virtue simply of the fact of suggesting that this is a scene worthy to be memorialized in oil paint.

In other words, it isn’t politics so much as political activism, that has paved the way for so much of the “bad” contemporary art. But I have a deeper concern with Kissick’s article.

Visual art is a dense reflection of our collective consciousness, a mirror on society. Politics hasn’t ruined art so much as contemporary art has revealed how much politics has infected culture, creativity, and consciousness writ large. It’s bad, but it’s not just the art that’s bad. Kissick’s gripe, I would argue, is less with art about politics than with our collective inability to rise above the mundane, incessant political sniping that we all participate in.

Art about politics isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know, but it shows us how difficult it is today to rise above the various socio-political conditioning that makes us human. And it’s only been getting worse.

So what are artists supposed to do? Is culture changing in any way that leaves open doors for alternative ways of thinking and creating?

The artists that interest me the most are artists that engage more deeply with the questions about what it means to be human. At this point, no one really has an answer to that question. Artificial intelligence is making us all obsolete to capital faster than we understand. So how are humans different? What can we experience that machines can’t? Put another way, what is it that makes the human experience, human consciousness, relatively easy to replicate once you get the digital networks and data centers in place?

Ultimately, I think contemporary art suffers under the weight and precedence of the historical avant-garde. This brought with it an attitude that artists have the responsibility to bring society forward into new futures. Today, it’s anachronistic, but artists still engage with it because we expect it of them.

Today, there fewer and fewer taboos for artists to break, and I believe that the artists who will stand the test of time will be those who have something intelligent to say about our place in the universe and be able to translate that into material form.