NOVEMBER- art and politics
I think it’s very difficult to separate politics out of one’s art, but then I have a fairly broad idea of what qualifies as political. (And also of what qualifies as art.) Art is frequently political in intent—whether directly promoted by the government like the famously striking propaganda art on both sides of World War II and the Cold War, or critical of the political environment like Johns’ Flag. More subtly, works like Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa and David’s Oath of the Horatii may deliberately incorporate contemporary political themes into an ostensibly neutral narrative piece. More tangentially, however, I would also consider many social themes such as issues of race, class, gender and sexuality to be political as well; certainly they are extremely political questions now. And they are extremely common themes in art—so I would consider works like [NAME]’s Madonna, or de Koonig’s pictures of women, or many of Rauschenberg’s assemblages, to be political as well—just on a level much more personally relevant to the artist.
And the thing is with these kinds of issues that, even in works of art that aren’t intended to deal with political and/or social issues at all, they are so basic that they tend to creep in by default—like in Glee, which is hardly meant to be political propaganda, but has been criticized for bringing in a “diverse” cast but failing in practice to actually give its minority characters fair treatment. Which is hardly an intentional political statement—or so I hope—but one has been made nonetheless. Even Oath of the Horatii, intended to be an inspirational piece about fighting for democracy, can be read as also promoting the marginalization of women for the sake of a cause. In an image or a narrative, things as basic as your choice of characters and how they are treated can prove to be an accidental but blatant political statement.
DECEMBER- art in popular culture
Would there be such a thing as popular culture without art? I can’t imagine how there would be. The things we commonly associate with popular culture—books, movies, music, television, cat macros—all of these things are creative endeavors. I certainly would never go so far as to claim that a lot of works in popular culture are good art, or particularly profound—but then again, even Professor Wilson finds the work of Salvador Dali thematically shallow while still admitting he was tremendously good at painting. Hamster Dance is not exactly Salvador Dali, of course, but Internet memes are kind of a gray area in which a single basic idea is beaten to death in thousands of visual, text, and video forms by thousands of different people. En masse, I suppose Slenderman, All Your Base, and their ilk become some kind of collaborative and/or performance work—but my point here is that, communicated merely in text form, I doubt memes would be nearly as potent. Even for such trivial, basic ideas, the ability to transmit them as images or videos adds massively to the speed and effectiveness with which memes are spread across the Internet.
Queen 