Art Transcends the Political
OCT 16, 2026
There’s a kerfuffle about art being political, with journalists and writers I respect, such as Matt Taibbi and Caitlin Johnstone, coming down on opposite sides of the issue.
Johnstone puts it bluntly: “I have no respect for this idea that art is somehow separable from politics. ALL art is political when you live in a genocidal dystopia, because all your expression exists in relation to our freakish civilization.”
While I sympathize with Johnston’s opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and have written plenty of articles myself against this genocide, I don’t define all my writing as reducible to politics. Writing is a form of self-expression, a creative act, and though we are all influenced by the society in which we live, that doesn’t mean that everything we write (or otherwise create) is necessarily a political expression.
Of course, art can have political meaning, often by design, occasionally not. But if all art is political, doesn’t that suggest that art is simply politics by another name?
Without looking at dictionary definitions, I think of art as a creative act. An act of imagination, an expression of the human spirit. We draw, we write, we sculpt, we make music, we dance, etc., as forms of expression. The richness of that expression–those creative acts–shouldn’t be reduced to political expressions. The best art transcends politics.
It’s like saying all sports is politics. Sure, sports can have political meaning, but sport is something more than political expression. For example, there is a physical joy to sports, as a form of expression, that denies its reduction to politics.
This idea that everything is politics or political is a dangerous one. It seems to be driven by those who want to attack others for the “wrong” politics in their art. Defining art as politics seems a handy formula for the dictator to outlaw or repress art that is considered dangerously “political” or otherwise threatening to political power.
Recall that in the 1930s Adolf Hitler attacked “Jewish” art as degenerate. Included in that was jazz as well, treated by the Nazis as a degenerate form of music, associated as it was with Black and Jewish musicians.
Art, put simply, is something more than politics, and those who create art shouldn’t be defined or judged or constrained or condemned by the politics of critics who see everything through a political lens.
I think the issue here is that all art exists, and is created, within some form of political context. And in fascism (and most all forms of totalitarian rule), which makes and requires *everything* political, the personal creative act cannot exist unless it either enables, or at the very least, refuses to challenge that prevailing power.
The ability to create and express freely is fundamentally dependent upon being able to do so within a society that allows such creation to take place, outside the dictates and needs of the prevailing ruling power. Recognizing that is a form of political consciousness. And the kind of art one makes thus entails some form of political choice, even when that choice is to not make explicitly political art.
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