State Of The Art
How The Arts Are Shaping Your Politics (Whether You Realize It Or Not)
Artists have powerful voices — and in Trump’s America, we need them now more than ever
To say politics and the arts are intertwined would be an understatement, but it’s a relationship that doesn’t often get specific attention of its own. By arts, I mean any of our art forms — including film, TV, theater, literature, dance, music, video games, visual art, etc. — and by politics, I’m counting any of the vast numbers of issues related to policy, identity, and how we organize our society.
Commentary on social concerns is such a part of our art that it may be harder to find art that is completely apolitical; nearly all acts of creation — of a story, a song, a painting — involve some level of subjective representation of the way things are (or could be), and this inevitably fosters a dialogue with the audience on how they feel about that perspective.
While it may just seem like entertainment, the art we consume can have a big impact on our politics and how we see the world. While journalism may serve as our primary method for political discourse, art is a close second, and it plays a more active role in shaping people’s ideologies than it often gets credit for.
The Far-Reaching Power Of Art
Finding quantifiable ways to measure how art influences people can be tricky, but the methods do exist. For example, researchers have found that looking at the cultural products a person likes on social media can be indicative of what their political views are. According to a 2013 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists who compiled several thousand Facebook profiles and questionnaires were able to develop a surprisingly accurate computer algorithm for predicting people’s personalities, beliefs, and other demographic information.
You can even try the current version yourself. In running my own profile likes (just the likes — no other information) through the system, I got decent results. It correctly believed me to be straight, single, and a non-Lutheran Protestant (which, being Methodist, checks out strangely well), but it also mistakenly expected me to be politically conservative. It also only recognized and had data for a few of my likes, even missing obvious ones like Hillary Clinton that should’ve been dead giveaways.
Still, the political patterns it finds are intriguing and illustrate the subtle discourse of values present in even the most seemingly apolitical situations. It might make sense, for example, that 30 Rock be associated with being liberal, but I wouldn’t have expected the same from the Miyazaki film Howl’s Moving Castle.
With this data, however, it’s still not clear whether the art people liked had directly influenced their views, but fortunately, there’s plenty of evidence that this occurs as well. The arts have played a pivotal role in shaping people’s views on race, both in times past and now. There’s good evidence television played a discernible role in the nineties towards the public acceptance of the gay community.
The impact of movies on people’s political views has been studied widely, on everything from trust in the government to global warming, and even in the video game world, we see examples of art becoming political, such as D.va from Overwatch having her logo turned into a symbol for women’s equality. And music has always had a powerful voice in our national conversations, in everything from the Vietnam protests to Beyoncé’s tribute to the Black Panthers at the 2016 Super Bowl.
And beyond specific political issues, the cultural products we encounter guide us in more general ways, informing what we value and how we make major decisions in our lives. For example, the success of CSI in the mid-2000’s led to a major increase in people pursuing careers in forensic science, while also cultivating some public misconception over how crimes are investigated in real life. We see a similar phenomenon in the way Game of Thrones has now brought medieval studies programs new attention, while also forcing scholars to contend with a generation of students whose views on the middle ages have been skewed by the show — particularly toward the historical legacies of women and people of color.
My work as an arts journalist and dramaturg has also exposed me to countless accounts of how theater has altered people’s lives. During a talkback for the Chicago production of Amanda Peet’s The Commons of Pensacola, a woman shared with me how the play had inspired her to reach out to her estranged daughter. The excellent play Luna Gale by Rebecca Gilman has also encouraged people to become foster parents.
And even beyond this, widespread studies have documented the way the arts drive our economy, bolster our healthcare systems, improve students’ academic achievement, and draw people to increased involvement with charities and local activism. The arts tangibly contribute to people being both more informed about the issues in their communities and more likely to get involved with addressing them. They don’t just shape people’s politics — they foment an overall interest in living a politically engaged life.
Why does this matter now, to our current political moment? In this article I’ve illustrated that the arts are always relevant and can be thought of as a branch of our overall political discourse. But we’re also in a unique situation of having a presidential administration more opposed to, yet entangled in, the arts than any in recent memory. Trump’s budget proposal for 2018 would eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (a minuscule 0.006% of our budget), even though some of Trump’s allies and staffers are major supporters of the arts, including the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and Steve Mnuchin, the film producer-turned-Secretary of the Treasury.
Trump himself even has a Broadway producing credit, and Steve Bannon is a former filmmaker and failed screenwriter (whose work includes— I kid you not — a hip hop musical based on Coriolanus) with business ties that also earn him royalties from Seinfeld. And whether he’s using Twitter to take swings at Saturday Night Live, Hamilton, and assorted celebrities, or praising his favorite Confederate statues, our president has also been uniquely ready to bring art controversies into the political arena.
We all know our entertainment frequently touches on social issues, but it can be overlooked just how big a role it plays in establishing our beliefs, and it deserves more attention as a branch of the overall political ecosystem. While political events and news media offer an overt forum for political discourse, the arts exist in a neighboring sphere of dialogue that holds tremendous influence of its own, even if they’re not something we traditionally classify as “politics.”
And under an administration so outspoken about the arts, the walls between these spheres are thinner than ever. So in this new series, I’ll explore the ways our current political conversations are driven by art, and what that means for our lives in Trump’s America. It remains the case that art, as a form of commentary, is subjective, and it’s of course not a substitute for expert reporting and journalism. But just as pundits and opinion writers are welcomed into our political conversations for their personal observations, so we can view artists in a similar light. We know their voices have power. If they didn’t, the president wouldn’t be trying so hard to silence them.
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