Is Art for Pleasure or Politics?

Source: CNN Style.

The art world has always debated where it falls on the spectrum between pleasure and politics. Do we really want art to challenge us with the conflicts and threats we find in the news every day?

Henri Matisse famously declared that he dreamed of an art “devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter … a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair.” His close friend Picasso, who more often indulged the darker sides of human emotion, wasn’t especially political in his art either.

Nonetheless, in the mid-1930s, during an urgent rush of creativity, the latter painted a dramatic mural-sized protest over the bombing of Guernica in the direct black and white tones of a newspaper. The political directness of his “Guernica” (pictured above) may have been inspired by the revolutionary attitude of his Mexican friend Diego Rivera, or the politically charged paintings of his historical compatriot Francisco Goya’s famous series, “Disasters of War.”

The painting is an obvious example of how aesthetics and protest are not mutually exclusive. Picasso showed that painter and painting could be both.

The art world has always debated where it falls on the spectrum between pleasure and politics. Do we really want art to challenge us with the conflicts and threats we find in the news every day?

Is it unfortunate that a few high-profile transgressive images can spoil a government’s appetite for art that might be described as simply beautiful, inspiring or educational? Maybe. Or maybe not. Are Ai Weiwei’s artistic provocations a threat — or more like a Socratic gadfly nibbling at the state to rouse it into becoming its better self?

The responsibilities of art

At LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where I serve as director), you’ll find plenty of examples of contemporary artists addressing our political era’s most pressing issues: Alejándro Iñárritu’s new and beautiful VR installation that engenders empathy for the plight of immigrants; a huge and seductive painting by Mark Bradford that calls out the injustices perpetrated by U.S. police against African-American men; or a spectacular mural by Barbara Kruger that, if not strictly protest art, is certainly pointed in its cry for greater awareness of what a capitalist consumer culture portends.

Consider also, however, that the pursuit of pure beauty can be more political than we think. Artists are always citizens of somewhere. They are also human, and thus carry the same responsibility that most of our politics, religions and philosophies suggest: that we should improve, not diminish, our lives and the world we inhabit.

The principles of aesthetics aren’t at odds with social and political responsibility. To use another example from LACMA, Chris Burden’s bright and iconic “Urban Light” sculpture at the museum’s entrance may have inspired more playful pictures on social media than any other major artwork in the world, but it has its own politics. The artist himself saw his composition of 202 historical street lamps, made a decade ago, as a statement about what constitutes a sophisticated society: “safe after dark and beautiful to behold,” as he put it.

The art world is far from consensus on the relationship between art and politics. Indeed, the lineup of artists discussing this very topic at an Intelligence Squared event in Hong Kong this week exemplifies the diversity of opinions on how — or even whether — the two should interact.

Great art has, through time, been made in many guises. It has been made as protest and as propaganda, made to disturb and to sooth, made to question and to express. Our increasingly globalized media-driven world brings us closer to many people’s struggles; it also brings us stories, and beauty, from everywhere.