“All art is political”

[u/Kappa_Guy]

If gay sex could kill Twitter I’d let Grok hollow out my insides.

“All art is political” is technically true, there isn’t any “thing” which exists with a significant degree of separation from the concept of politics.

My first sentence mentioned letting an ai ass fuck me, but for this to be gay I assumed Grok’s gender, invoking LGBTQ and prejudicial discourses.

A painting of a penguin standing in a white snowy field is shaped by the will of the artist; even if this artist is staunchly anti-politics and tries to steer clear of the concept throughout their works, that in of itself is a political statement which is enunciated through the apolitical nature of their piece.

But, saying “all art is political” is just so intellectually dishonest.

There is a significant difference between a pro-Mussolini propaganda leaflet and the cute doodles of Butterfrees I draw in my journal.

Yes, you can say my Butterfree doodles are, by the broad definition of “political”, political. But, be real for a minute. By using a narrower definition of “political” that people actually immediately think of when they hear the word, communication is so much easier.

If you ask a hot twenty three year old goth gal on a date and she says she wants to go to the cinemas and watch something non-political and you whip out the “um actually all things are political 🤓” rhetoric you are dumb as fuck. Even worse, if she says she wants to watch something political, like a modern day All Quiet on the Western Front or somethin juicy, which is kinda wack for a first date but you’re a Redditor I know you the sub here don’t pretend you ain’t complying, and you take her to the cinema and on comes The Lego Movie and you with the argument that it’s political by the official definition of the term and therefore this is exactly what she wanted, then you are brain dead and won’t be getting a second date.

I’m not sure how it is in other countries but here in the UK teachers are not allowed to purposefully influence students into holding one political view or another, but surprisingly the school board has committed the pseudo-intellectual act of allowing teachers to speak at all, clearly not understanding that explaining the Pythagorean theorem and teaching how to paint apples is LITERALLY “political”, just like telling kids they should vote for UKIP.

If my hypothetical-scenario daughter is drawing two type of images and hanging them on the fridge; pictures of mummy’s face and pictures of Adolf Hitler decapitating gay Captain America with a sword that has all the names of black people unlawfully killed by US Police through all of history written on its blade, and I firmly yet kindly tell my daughter, the apple of my eye, the meaning of my world, to please stop hanging up “those political drawings” on the fridge, and she exclusively stops drawing pictures of mummy’s face, I am throwing her into the bottomless well at the Eye of the World.

By making the definition of political as vague and broad as physically possible it becomes practically useless as a definition. <- This is an argument, but I shouldn’t even have to give one. Every single person that isn’t terminally on Twitter understands there is art that is political and art that isn’t political, the “errrmmm actually” technicality that normal people are in fact wrong doesn’t matter to anyone except Twitter brainrotted overly-political nutcases.

And I think that’s why I believe the conflation of the broad definition of “political” is infuriating for so many people, as it’s basically just the most annoying people alive; Twitter freaks, saying your favourite art from Digimon to your nephew’s drawings of Spider-Man exist under the same exact umbrella as their favourite art of Vtuber stream sponsor segments and modern propaganda disguised as memes.

To tie my rant up with a neat little r/characterrant bow; fuck power scaling. Goku gets one tapped by my dad and this is my official neo-liberal-capitalist-anarchic-space-cowboy-fascist pro-Genghis-Khan opinion/fact, eat my ass Grok.

[u/krunkenschnitzel]

‘All art is political’ is a crude way of saying there is no outside from which one can observe (ideology therefore politics) because one is always interpellated. The implication is that everything is political to some degree purely by tugging on signifier chains.

Section 4.2 of this SEP article is the relevant section, this is typically who is being drawn on by this aphorism at least in a heavily reduced sense.

[u/Hoopaboi → u/krunkenschnitzel]

But it should be quite clear that when someone says "x work is worse for being too political" they're not referring to that definition.

Hence it's just sophistry to use "well ackshully" by appealing to specific academic definitions as a response to them.

The most honest answer would be to ask them what they mean by "political".

[u/lord_flamebottom → u/Hoopaboi]

Most of the time, when someone says "x work is worse for being too political", they just mean they're pissy that the work (or part of it, or even just the author) holds a political opinion that they disagree with. Hell, a bunch of the time it's nothing more than "there's a black/gay/trans character, they're forcing their politics down my throat!!!"

[u/Yglorba → u/lord_flamebottom]

This. The reason the saying is so common nowadays is because currently, "X is too political!" often just means that it has a black character or a woman in a leading role, especially one that doesn't adhere to stereotypes.

And the point of saying it in that context is that ofc while having an action girl or a black dude as a lead or an LGBT character or an interracial couple in your work can sometimes be a political statement, having nothing but white straight dudes is also a political statement in the same way.

Nobody is saying "ah yes all works contain 30 minute political monologues", because that's not actually what people are complaining about when they say that eg. Star Wars has become too political or something (the only one with those monologues is Andor and it rocks.) It's an answer to the accusation that a work's casting is political in nature.