The video explores the intersection of art and politics, using examples such as Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar to demonstrate how art is not only entertaining but deeply political. It traces the theoretical roots of this intersection back to Plato, discussing his views on art's role in a political utopia and its potential danger by appealing too much to emotions over reason. The video then moves to 1930s Germany, illustrating how the Nazis used art as propaganda while simultaneously censoring avant-garde artistic expressions.

It further delves into the polarized views on political art as seen through figures like Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno. Brecht's committed art put politics at the fore, engaging audiences through alienation effects, while Adorno saw greater potential in avant-garde art that maintained its independence from political discourse. The video argues that modern debates continue to discuss whether art should be explicitly political or remain autonomous.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. interrogate [ɪnˈtɛrəˌɡeɪt] - (verb) - To question someone thoroughly or aggressively. - Synonyms: (question, grill, examine)

They keep making art that interrogates our history and issues of the day.

2. utopia [juːˈtoʊ.piː.ə] - (noun) - An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. - Synonyms: (paradise, heaven, idyll)

Remember his vision for a political utopia?

3. craft [kræft] - (noun) - An activity involving skill in making things by hand. - Synonyms: (skill, expertise, artistry)

He thought of both art and politics as a kind of craft and acquired skill.

4. effeminacy [ɪˈfɛm.ə.nə.si] - (noun) - The quality of being effeminate; showing traits traditionally considered typical of a woman. - Synonyms: (softness, delicacy, womanliness)

Art, on the other hand, was emotional, promoting, as Plato put it, weeping, laughter and effeminacy.

5. quarrel [ˈkwɔːr.əl] - (noun) - An angry argument or disagreement, typically between people who are usually on good terms. - Synonyms: (dispute, disagreement, feud)

Plato calls this tension between rational philosophy and emotional art the ancient quarrel.

6. propaganda [ˌprəʊ.pəˈɡæn.də] - (noun) - Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view. - Synonyms: (information, promotion, publicity)

Ever since, people have seized on this idea, and not always with the best intentions, like, hmm, who do I know who famously used art as propaganda? Yep, that's my Nazi detector

7. aesthetic [esˈθet.ɪk] - (adjective) - Concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty. - Synonyms: (artistic, elegant, style)

This one featured works made by Nazi approved German artists who depicted a traditional conservative aesthetic.

8. alienation [ˌeɪ.li.əˈneɪ.ʃən] - (noun) - The state or experience of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or in which one should be involved. - Synonyms: (estrangement, isolation, detachment)

He called this the alienation effect.

9. avant-garde [ˌæv.ɒntˈɡɑːrd] - (adjective) - New and experimental ideas and methods in art, music, or literature. - Synonyms: (innovative, experimental, progressive)

Adorno argued that the most politically effective art was also the most challenging, obscure, and avant garde.

10. mythologize [mɪˈθɒl.ə.dʒaɪz] - (verb) - To create or promote an exaggerated or idealized image of. - Synonyms: (idealize, glorify, romanticize)

Walter Benjamin, pointed out that we tend to mythologize art.

Should Art Be Political?

Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar, Greta Gerwig, Megan Thee, Stallion, Boots, Riley Chapelron, Childish Gambino. They all make art that's not just fun or entertaining or danceable. They make art that's political. And making political art can make people 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.

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 and 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 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 super fan, 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. 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 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, hmm, 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 Vasily 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 news, 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 going to want to see the controversial stuff.

To really get your political propaganda to the masses through art though, the Nazis figured that you've got to go where the common man. The movie theater. Let's go to the tape.

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.

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 maintain their own thoughts about what made art political, which basically fell into two 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. 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, et cetera, 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 off stage 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 Teodor 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.

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 Marxistized 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 27 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. The sculpture doesn't state its politics in words, but its message is clear.

So here's where I've landed for 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. Anybody else feeling hungry?

The Beyonces 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 what? One more big question. What does it mean to be seen? I'll see you there.

POLITICAL ART, PLATO, HISTORY, ART, CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, CRASHCOURSE