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art & politics

 Some have claimed that the birth of Abstract Expressionism in the US while not caused by it may have had connections to McCarthyism when it was deemed safer not to be explicit. In China, Ai Weiwei claims that to solely make paintings of traditional themes is forced by the repressive mechanisms of the state against the body and spirit.

When will political bullies bugger off and allow artists to create art representative of the enormous capacity and potential of the human spirit? Social media umpires demand that an artist explain herself at all times quoting things out of context and denying the symbolic and the dramatic, modes, poetics, traditions, fiction, the right to transgress to name but a few. It gets harder and harder to make art where a sophisticated audience is required, after all everything on the internet is rated G. & so art is embroiled in suspicion much like it was under Hitler & Stalin, the message that the human is so terrifying that if she lets go in her art, and great art requires this, she must be silenced. Any artist I’ve known began in innocence and joy and is, alas, taught to feel self-conscious, when the whole purpose of art is to escape the self and merge with the whole.

For this reason Nietzsche celebrated the Dionysian Dance. He had a point, but should have stuck much the time to art and avoided politics, because when people don’t trust their artists/writers they are more likely to read into their art a call to arms. And a call to arms can be embraced just as it can be rejected.


Copyright dance parrot 2022. 

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