Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda

by Joes Segal

In Art and Politics , Segal explores the collision of politics and art in seven enticing essays. The book explores the position of art and artists under a number of different political regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, traveling around the world to consider how art and politics have interacted and influenced each other in different conditions.

Joes Segal takes you on a journey to the Third Reich, where Emil Nolde supported the regime while being called degenerate; shows us Diego Rivera creating Marxist murals in Mexico and the United States for anti-Marxist governments and clients; ties Jackson Pollock's drip paintings in their Cold War context to both the FBI and the CIA; and considers the countless images of Mao Zedong in China as unlikely witnesses of radical political change.

168 pages, Paperback

Published June 16, 2016

Reviews

[mia moraru]

'...the idea that there is a strict distinction between purity and propaganda is politically motivated, and this motivation still informs the way we tend to think about art and its history. An analysis in terms of this strict distinction will always lead to paradoxes and incongruities.'

'What I see as the most important conclusion of this book, however, is not the inability of theoreticians to interpret daily life or the political bias of their projections. Rather, it is the power of art to call these projections into question. The Pink Lenin on the cover of this book immediately shows that the power of politicians to reduce art to propaganda is effectively countered by the power of the creative individual to make propaganda into art again.' -- i agree. which we see every single day! wall st bull. the newest banksy in london of a judge beating a protestor that got washed off but its shadow is preserved and makes it almost more powerful. even in the meme-ification of events like c k!rk. upturning of meaning, layering, reinventing. etc etc etc. art is power.

[Ella Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of essays on different intersections between art and politics. Particularly enjoyed the exploration of Ai Weiwei and Kara Walker's artwork and wish there had been a bit more of art analysis in the other chapters.