Beyoncé.

Kendrick Lamar. Greta Gerwig.

Megan Thee Stallion. Boots Riley. Chappell Roan.

Childish Gambino. They all make art that’s not just fun or entertaining or dance-able. They make art that’s political.

And making political art can make people… [drum roll] pretty mad. But despite constantly being  told to “stay in your lane”  by political and  anonymous commenters alike, they keep on doing it. They keep making art that interrogates  our history and issues of the day.

So why do people make political art? And can you even have art without politics? Hi!

I'm Ellie Anderson and this  is Crash Course Political Theory. [THEME MUSIC] My journey started, once again,  with our old friend Plato. Remember his vision for a political utopia? It would be led by someone who’s moral, intellectual, and yearns for truth— —what he called a “philosopher king.” Not to be confused with the other kings, burger and short, who have different priorities.

But Plato also talks about the role of art in  a political utopia, and his  thinking there was split. He thought of both art and politics as a kind of craft, an acquired skill. On one hand, you had statecraft,  the domain of the rational mind.

It involves exercising “capital-R”  Reason in governing a citizenry. Art, on the other hand, was emotional, promoting,  as Plato put it, “weeping,”  “laughter,” and “effeminacy.” “Poetry feeds and waters the  passions and desires,” he writes. “She lets them rule instead of ruling them.” Plato calls this tension  between rational philosophy  and emotional art the “ancient quarrel.” Which is also what I call my internal dialogue about when to do the dishes. Plato was pro-philosophy, but  he wasn’t totally anti-art.

He actually loved the arts! Especially poetry — he was a Homer superfan. And he thought that art could be  used for the good of the state —like poems extolling the virtues of famous men, and music that pumps up warriors for battle.

But Plato also worried that  art might be too powerful  in shaping public consciousness. Pumping up warriors with a sick beat is one thing, but if art distracts us from  reality and fills our heads  with what he called a mere imitation of the truth, well, that’s where the danger lies. If you have too much emotion, you won’t have any room for reason, and he thought the philosopher king needed to keep this power in check.

So, yeah, that’s a bit of an extreme take. But Plato did identify something important: that art can be used for and against politics. Ever since, people have seized on this idea — and not always with the best intentions.

Like, hmmm, who do I know who  famously used art as propaganda? Yep, that’s my Nazi detector. It’s 1930s Germany, and we’re in the land of the  National Socialist German  Workers' Party—or the Nazi Party.

Like Plato, they recognized that art could be used to shape cultural and political identity, and they had a very particular idea  of what “German identity” should be. It was a booming time for cultural expression, with developments in Dadaism, Expressionism, modernist architecture and  design, and cabaret culture. But the Nazi regime thought  this kind of art had no place  in the Aryan society they were trying to create.

So in 1937, the Nazi regime confiscated thousands  of these works from German  galleries and private collections. But before they got rid of  it, they wanted everyone  to know exactly what kind of deranged, un-German art they considered unacceptable. So, they displayed it!

The “Degenerate Art” exhibit included works  by celebrated artists like Paul  Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. It was all crammed together  like an old thrift store,  with the intention of making it  hard to appreciate the artistry. Oh, and kids weren’t allowed  in—way too corruptible.

At the same time, they set  up another exhibit right  around the corner, called The  Great German Art Exhibition. This one featured works made  by Nazi-approved German artists  who depicted a traditional,  conservative aesthetic— pre-industrial farm scenes,  classical nudes, World War I imagery. But this tactic backfired:  the Degenerate Art exhibit  was seen by nearly two million visitors, more than three and a half times the boring, traditional German art exhibit.

If you’ve ever been on the internet, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that folks are always gonna want to see the controversial stuff. To really get your political propaganda to the masses through art, though, the Nazis figured that you’ve gotta go where the common man goes—the movie theater. Let’s go to the tape. [TV static] In one instance, Nazi leaders  hired Leni Riefenstahl  to create the infamous film “Triumph of the Will.” The nearly two-hour, black-and-white  film placed triumphant  scoring over footage of the 1934  Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.

It was an event in large  part staged for the camera, and Riefenstahl edited the footage  to make Hitler and his Nazis  look so powerful that their  takeover seemed all but inevitable. It was used to lift up the state and inspire the so-called warriors — just like Plato imagined. [TV static] Fortunately, it wasn’t all  Nazi propaganda, all the time. I found that other German  artists were still making art,  despite the risk of intimidation,  violence, and the whole degenerate thing.

It turns out they maintained  their own thoughts about what  made art political, which  basically fell into two camps: art is political for what it says, and art is political for what it doesn’t say. We’re about to get a little heady. I’m gonna need some coffee. [Ellie scoffs] [Coffee sloshing] Here’s the deal with those two camps I mentioned.

The first camp argued for making art that’s explicitly used as an instrument of politics —what they called “Committed Art”. This is art where the political  agenda is front and center— the stuff you look at and say, “yeah, I know what side that person’s on.” A lot of this work grew out of the artistic period that Hitler and his henchmen were so against— the Dadaism, Expressionism,  etc. that I mentioned before,  which collectively made up the  “Weimar Era” cultural renaissance. My favorite example of this is German playwright  Bertolt Brecht’s most famous  work, the “Threepenny Opera,” a searing portrayal of a  capitalist society run amok,  where just about anyone would do  just about anything for money.

But Brecht’s take on political playwriting  went beyond the storyline of his plays. He experimented with techniques like having actors step out of character to lecture viewers, or designing the stage to show lights  and ropes that are usually hidden. He called this “the alienation effect.” The goal was to interrupt the audience’s emotional involvement in a play and get them to take what he called a socialist  realist perspective instead— essentially, to think  critically about the constructs  that exist in their own, real-life environment.

Like, what’s hidden just offstage in your life? How can we shine metaphorical  lights on the metaphorical  ropes that are holding up  systems of power in reality? Where was I?

Oh, two camps of political artists, right. The second camp didn’t want their  art to address politics directly. German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that the most politically effective art was also the most challenging, obscure, and avant-garde —the stuff that really pushes the envelope.

He believed that radical artistic experimentation  was far more politically potent  than overtly political art, like the explicitly Marxist art Brecht was making, because it was resistant to everything, even interpretation. [Pouring coffee] This is the “Autonomous Art” approach. Art becomes political by  refusing to engage with politics  and maintaining its  independence from human spheres. But it turns out that these two approaches are far from the only ways that art does politics.

Another thinker of the time, Walter Benjamin, pointed out that we tend to mythologize art and set it apart from the rest of the world, making us susceptible to manipulation by propaganda. So, in Benjamin’s view, the  solution is to democratize art. Well, more like Marx-icize art.

If we can reproduce art, then we can deprive it of its capacity to forge some grand narrative. And here’s the thing: these debates—about if and how art should be political—carry on today. Which brings us back to the present… where my head’s still spinning.

Maybe I’ve been asking the wrong question. Maybe the question isn’t  whether art should be political— — it’s clear from our journey through time that it is, one way or another.  Maybe it’s a matter of approaching  a piece of art on its own terms,  and asking what it has to say about our world. Let’s take one more stop, in Richmond, Virginia,  the former capital of the Confederacy  during the U.

S. Civil War. Once, Richmond was home to more confederate statues than any other city in the US.

Which made it a hotbed for a pressing debate around how art commemorates American figures— and which figures get to become heroes. Confederate statues enshrine  a particular narrative  about how the Civil War should be remembered— like, that it really wasn’t  about slavery, and that the South  only lost because the North had more resources, an idea often called the “lost cause narrative.” And in recent decades, Confederate monuments have become symbols of an ongoing political battle over whose stories take the spotlight, and what America does—and should—stand for. But one artist is fighting statues…with statues.

In 2019, Kehinde Wiley, the famed painter of Barack Obama’s presidential portrait, crafted a twenty-seven-foot-tall  sculpture of a man  triumphantly poised upon a battle-ready steed He installed it at the  Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,  right near Richmond’s infamous Monument Avenue. It looks in many ways just like the monuments  that once lined that  street—huge, imposing, bronze. But the man depicted in this statue is Black, and he’s got way better style   than those Confederate generals.

Wiley’s artwork transforms a public space that  for more than a century was  home to a very different vision of America’s past and present. This sculpture doesn’t  state its politics in words,  but its message is clear. So here’s where I’ve landed for now: art and politics are less like oil and water, and more like peanut butter and jelly: they do a lot separately, but they’re often found between the same pieces of bread.

Is anybody else feeling hungry? The Beyoncés and Greta Gerwigs of the world might not be running for office… yet. But their art does so many things — like expand the imagination,  challenge social conceptions,  and evoke emotional responses  to real-world issues.

And all of that changes the way we think about, talk about, and do politics. Art informs how we see the world — how we believe things work, how we think they should work, and what pathways we see as possible for whom. Next time, we’ll wrap up our time together by asking one more big question: what does it mean to be seen?

I’ll see you there. Thanks for watching this episode  of Crash Course Political Theory  which was filmed at the Basteel Studio and was made with the help  of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash  Course free for everyone,  forever, you can join our community on Patreon.