---
title: "The arts and politics"
chunk: 1/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_arts_and_politics"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:57:32.078754+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

A strong relationship between the arts and politics, particularly between various kinds of art and power, occurs across historical epochs and cultures.  As they respond to contemporaneous events and politics, the arts take on political as well as social dimensions, becoming themselves a focus of controversy and even a force of political as well as social change.
A widespread observation is that a great talent has a free spirit. For instance Pushkin, who some scholars regard as Russia's first great writer, is said to have attracted the irritation of the Russian officialdom and particularly of the Tsar, since he "instead of being a good servant of the state in the rank and file of the administration and extolling conventional virtues in his vocational writings (if write he must), composed extremely arrogant and extremely independent and extremely wicked verse in which a dangerous freedom of thought was evident in the novelty of his versification, in the audacity of his sensual fancy, and in his propensity for making fun of major and minor tyrants."

== History of art ==
According to Groys, "Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics."

=== Social and political change ===
Pertaining to such politically-intractable phenomena as the Modern conflicts in the Middle East, however, some artists and social critics believe that "art is useless as a tool for political change." There are, nevertheless, examples where artists employ art in the service of political change.

== Role of poetry ==
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The Italian poet Ungaretti, when interviewed on transgression by director Pasolini for the 1964 Love Meetings documentary, said that the foundation of poetry is to transgress all laws.
The recitation of powerful, pithy poetry is a popular art form at American protests and political rallies. From the civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights, and Puerto Rican Independence movements to Black Lives Matter, poetry is used to build emotional unity in crowds and draw media attention. Giannina Braschi wrote, "Poets and anarchists are always the first to go. Where? To the frontline. Wherever it is." Protest poems include Gwendolyn Brooks "Riot", Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Tato Laviera's "Lady Liberty", Nikki Giovanni's "Rosa Parks", Amiri Baraka's "Short Speech to My Friends," and Jill McDonough's "Dear Gaybashers".  Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was arrested at an antiwar demonstration in New York City in 1967 and tear-gassed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.

== Examples ==

=== Situationist International ===
The Situationist International (SI), a small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th-century European artistic and political avant-gardes formed in 1957, aspired to major social and political transformations; before disbanding in 1972 and splitting into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational, and the Second Situationist International, the first SI became active in Europe through the 1960s and elsewhere throughout the world and was characterized by an anti-capitalist and surrealist perspective on aesthetics and politics, according to Italian art historian Francesco Poli.
In the works of the situationists, Italian scholar Mirella Bandini observes, there is no separation between art and politics; the two confront each other in revolutionary terms.
McDonough believes that once artistic-intellectual works are separated from current events and from a comprehensive critique of society, they are sterilized and can be safely integrated into the official culture and the public discourse, where they can add new flavours to old dominant ideas and play the role of a gear wheel in the mechanism of the society of the spectacle.

=== Poster art ===
"Not content with claiming leftwing music", posters for the Conservative Party in the UK recycled iconic art styles of "socialist revolution" to communicate its political message in 2008.
In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Shepard Fairey's Barack Obama "Hope" poster became almost instantly iconic and inseparable from Obama and his campaign. Almost immediately after its creation, the artwork went viral, spreading throughout social media and through word of mouth (largely due to the publicity efforts of Yosi Sergant).
Throughout history, Communist governments have used poster art as a common form of propaganda used to promote the ideology of communism, namely the Soviet Union in the early 20th Century. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia defines communist propaganda as being the expression of the essential worldview of the working class and its natural aims and interests defined by its historical position as the social force which will ultimately usher in the epoch of communism. 

=== Entropa ===
Czech sculptor David Černý's Entropa, a sculpture commissioned to mark the Czech presidency of the European Union Council during the first semester of 2009, illustrates how art can come into conflict with politics, creating various kinds of controversy in the process, both intentionally and unintentionally. Entropa attracted controversy both for its stereotyped depictions of the various EU member states and for having been a creation of Černý and two friends rather than, as Černý purported, a collaboration of 27 artists from each of the member states. Some European Union members states reacted negatively to the depiction of their country, with Bulgaria, for instance, deciding to summon the Czech Ambassador to Sofia in order to discuss the illustration of the Balkan country as a collection of squat toilets (ČTK).  This "Europe-wide hoax … reveals deeper truths" not only about the countries but "about art itself" (Gavrilova).

=== Russian aesthetics ===
After the Russian Revolution, Soviet Art came under strict ideological control. According to Esti Sheinberg, a lecturer in music at the University of Edinburgh, in her book about Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, in "the traditional Russian perception of the arts", an "interrelationship between artistic technique and ideological content is the main aesthetic criterion" (ix; cf. Blois).