There’s a common phrase you tend to hear among a certain subset of people: “All art is inherently political.” On the surface that postulate makes very little sense, because very little art is explicitly made to support some political agenda. So few pieces, in fact, that when art does seem to have such a message, we notice it (Guernica, The Grapes of Wrath, etc.). What those who believe in that phrase may mean moreso is that all art implicitly has value judgments—what’s good? What’s bad? What’s necessary for society? What did the artist have the chance to spend their time thinking about? They believe all art has the political beliefs of their creator hidden in them.
What that entails is that the rococo painting of the French countryside cleanly showcases the land ownership of the aristocracy, which we—in hindsight—know will soon be decapitated. This would not have been known to the artist of course, but we have the power of interpretation over his work. Just like we also have interpretation over his own identity, for any French artist in the 18th century obviously was wealthy enough to have the resources to paint and not have to plow the very fields he depicts. In other words, this belief is a type of prescriptivism.
The other camp asserts that art can be apolitical. A painting of a sunset is a painting of a sunset, not an evocation of the rights of the individual who had a chance to paint it. The sunset calls towards feelings in the viewer—nostalgia, grief, joy, awe—which transcend political partisanship and social hierarchies and appeal to a shared humanity. That there is a difference between political context (the conditions that allow the art to exist) and political content (what the art is actually doing). That one can understand art for the sake of art, and to look at the art itself in the way it chooses to depict itself. In other words to make it free. This belief is a type of descriptivism.
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This more humanistic viewpoint is the camp I fall into. In my opinion, the prescriptive crowd defines politics in an incredibly broad sense to make their statement unfalsifiable—because they conflate human values with politics. If you are the person making a claim as widespread as all art is political, you must prove it, not me—because you are the person making the claim. Think Russell’s teapot: if I were to claim there is a teapot orbiting the Earth, it would make much more sense for me to prove that there is such a thing than for you to have to defend the idea that there is not such a thing. It would make more sense to examine the work for what it says than for anyone to inject their preconceived notions about the artist into the piece. This is why high-level art analysis tends to use perspectives: Marxist, mental health, LGBTQ+, so we can understand a work through multiple lenses—and not a preconceived conclusion. Noticing the beauty of the sunset ought to be just as valid of an interpretation as regarding the labor in the field.
We ought avoid broad, dishonest, often simply privileged and prescriptive takes like the ideas that all art is political and that we can prescribe a person’s identity onto their art. Even if we try to include underprivileged voices in historical art, if we do it in this way, do we not minimize them by removing the nuance? Do we not abuse our gracious privilege of hindsight to judge the art? Do we not detach ourselves from the tangibility of the art itself in the process through appealing to some worldview the art must corroborate? Why are we now interrogating the artist instead of considering intent? This same prescriptive impulse appears outside art criticism—in how we talk about politics itself.
Some will argue that it is also privileged to maintain that art can show itself. That a person like me (once again prescribing an identity!) can afford to ditch reservations and have that “clean” look at a piece without biases. That looking at art in this mild way is uniquely “centrist” of me. That like the sunset must be political according to the postulate, I must have a lack of conviction.
I’m sorry. This take is uniquely awful. It’s so stupid it’s practically making this face: 🥴—a masterpiece of circular reasoning. Centrism, for those unaware, is a distorted, caricatured version of a new-age term from the early twentieth century. “Centrists” were originally simply those who supported a policy of taking a middle position between revolutionary and reformist views, like the German SPD or the French “Le Centre.” That’s it. It’s a term for a left-wing reformer who does not want a revolution—who were met with a distaste by those who did want upheaval. Through much misunderstanding of this term, it has instead somehow been convoluted to mean someone who is a political moderate. I will not pretend words cannot change meanings, but I will add that this transition has not been helped by the fact that the political compass (not even originally an educational tool, but a libertarian propaganda mechanism to make their beliefs appear more common—look it up! The “Nolan Chart!”) is where most people understand centrism in the modern day.
Centrism must be the privileged center that is not on the left nor right nor libertarian nor authoritarian wings of the diagram, right? This suggests people who fall into the “center” are apolitical. Just as those who place identity on art throw disdain on the basic political or human ability to understand nuance, they avoid acknowledging that the propaganda tool does not adequately demonstrate political beliefs, and so project (prescribe!) identities onto unfortunate moderates. They force them into a middle section of having no convictions, no values—for if they believe all art has value judgments, they at the same time imply a person without any values can exist in the center, and thus choose to hate the center based on a subject of their own creation. They do not comprehend that “left” and “right” isn’t a diametrically opposed spectrum, even more in the modern day when right-wing populist governments all over the world are instituting traditional left-wing beliefs like populism in economics. Again—DDPP: detached, dishonest, prescriptive, privileged.
The center—in the way at least that the political compass suggests as a void of conviction—does not exist. Because to pretend a centrist has no concrete-strong political views at all is to pretend a person can’t have both traditionally left and right wing views. To pretend that the extreme fringes of politics have always been those driving progress. To pretend that many of the most successful and, importantly, stable political movements haven’t had less dogmatism behind them is the most DDPP thing of all.
Germany is the richest country in Europe by GDP, has relatively low industrial strife, and a massive middle class; West Germany’s post-WWII success was built on an economic policy called Soziale Marktwirtschaft (Social Market Economy), which insisted on free-market capitalism with a strong safety net and worker protections. The political compass prescribes either that such a policy with two wings on both the left and right wing cannot exist coherently, or that this policy is in the center, and thus spineless and ineffective—which we can see it is not. West Germany avoided the radicalization it had itself seen in the 1930s, when the opposite ends of the political compass were entering street brawls because they assumed they could not coexist—that the more extreme the ideology the more pure, which only led to violence and authoritarianism. That any disagreement is a prescribed fundamental and artistic conflict of identity.
Compare post-war West to East Germany, which had stifled growth due to the sort of command economy the more extreme Communist view posited as the solution. West Germany succeeded because it viewed politics as a practical tool for human welfare rather than an identity-driven performance. It viewed the center as a place of synthesis, not a prescribed blank space.
We no longer need to be the 18th-century artist, unknowingly painting the seeds of a revolution, nor do we need to be the modern critic, searching for a manifesto in every brushstroke. We can choose to be the viewer who simply sees the field. It is not cowardice or propaganda. The center isn’t a place where one stands for nothing—it’s the only place where one is truly free to see everything: the whole sunset. It stops being about the center at this point, and interestingly, it stops being about art as well. We reach the crux of it all—that we can trust ourselves past that DDPP refrain. That we all deserve interpretative freedom.
