Art in the Social Environment
When we think of art as a product of its social environment, we likely simply think of it as being a product of the artist’s artistic influences. Artists look to other artists, either emulating them or reacting against them, to create their own works. Yet, this is not the only social environment which affects the contents of works of art.
The world is made up of a variety of self-organizing social environments. There are, in addition to the artistic social order, the economic order, the political order, the financial/monetary order, the scientific order, the technological order, the philosophical order, the religious order, and so on. Each of these has an effect on the artist and on the production of art itself. They can affect the creation of movements in the arts, and they can affect the content of a given work of art. It’s all a matter of untangling those influences to see them, and then understanding how the interact.
Many contemporary works of art are quite explicitly political in nature. They advertise their political concerns openly, and in too many cases are pure propaganda. This hardly means that there aren’t or weren’t political elements to works we wouldn’t consider to be political in the least — say, the works of Monet. He certainly did works that addressed or referenced the French politics of his day, and the French people of his day would have…
