Art? At A Time Like This?

On The Revolutionary Power of Art and What Lies Beyond Propaganda

Just minutes into 20 Days in Mariupol, a harrowing documentary about the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a man fleeing his home in the aftermath of Russian bombing looks at the filmmaker and calls him a “prostitute.” It’s a powerful accusation, asserting that the act of filming this suffering is somehow commodifying something that shouldn’t be commodified.

A few scenes later a soldier asks the filmmaker not to film. Mstyslav Chernov, who’s been a war correspondent and videographer for 20 years responds simply: “Understand, this is a historical war. To not document is… impossible.”

Moments later, as a medical team struggles to revive a child struck by Russian bombs, a doctor looks into the camera and demands that he film what’s happening, “Show this Putin bastard the eyes of this child, and all these doctors who are crying.”

Later in the film Chernov reflects on his years documenting war in the region. And with the horrors of war continuing and even increasing in spite of his efforts to shine a light on this violence, he questions whether this work—which he puts his life on the line to create—really has much impact.

20 Days in Mariupol would go on to be widely viewed and acclaimed, winning Best Documentary at that year’s Academy Awards, achieving the best case scenario for this kind of work. And yet, years later the war continues, Chernov is gearing up to debut his second film about the invasion. If we’re measuring the impact of his work in strictly utilitarian terms, it makes sense that he might be questioning whether what he’s doing is really accomplishing anything.

Chernov’s work cannot be reduced to an artistic endeavor. It is journalistic reporting, and historical documentation. But it contains a struggle and contradiction that many artists face, one which is unfortunately becoming increasingly urgent to answer.

“In this present crisis, is it any longer possible to speak of the revolutionary meaning of art? This is the fundamental question.” -John Berger

Even if your country isn’t under literal siege, it is in times like these that many artists find themselves questioning the value and validity of their work. Beyond artists themselves, critics and audiences might struggle with how to judge the quality or value of artistic works when it feels like there is a need for this work to be meaningful and impactful.

As someone who half-chose, half-fell-into a career as an artist and critic, but who wants my work to be meaningful¹, I’ve been increasingly haunted by this question. How relevant is making art and talking about art in a time of crisis? Should I ditch this to focus my work on something else that might theoretically matter much more?

Some folks don’t seem bothered by this question. Maybe for them the way their art beautifies the world is enough of a reason. Some see their art mostly as a means to gain influence. Influence they then hope to leverage for good. For some the question is irrelevant—art is just what they do. I’m not here to call out anyone who is satisfied by these reasons, but they have never quite satisfied me. None of them sufficiently explain the visceral power that art seems to have. I have an intuition that art could be more, mean more, but for a long time I struggled to understand exactly how.

Art critic John Berger called the question of art’s ability to do social good a “situation of extreme crisis.” In his essay Revolutionary Undoing he writes, “There is not a significant artist in the world who is not asking himself whether his art is justified - not on account of the quality of his talent, but on account of the relevance of art to the demands of the time in which he is living.”²

Like Berger I wanted to know if art really could be a revolutionary force. If I could answer that question it would have a significant influence on how I spend my time as an artist. And as a critic, it would also influence the way I critique and evaluate art.

Berger’s answer to this question is the most satisfying I’ve encountered so far, and I want to share it with you.

Art in Crisis

Reading John Berger I get the sense of someone who was able to see a work of art in its totality. He was in love with the beauty of artistry and its possibilities, yet he pulled no punches in critiquing a work’s social and political relevance. Importantly he wasn’t just doing the all-too-common surface work of critiquing the messages a work of art carried, but also the context that created and sustained them. He threaded all these things together with a deep understanding of the craft involved in making the art he wrote about and an appreciation for the raw sensual beauty of experiencing art directly.

If you’re not familiar with Berger’s work, I highly recommend checking out his influential television series Ways of Seeing (1972). If you only know him from Ways of Seeing, don’t stop there—his other works of criticism are just as worthwhile. Today I’m drawing from two of his essays, Revolutionary Undoing and The Ideal Critic and the Fighting Critic, both of which can be found in the collection Landscapes.

For Berger the political and social crisis artists found themselves in during the 20th century was alarming, but nothing new. Berger was a dedicated leftist, and even if you don’t identify as a leftist I want you to consider for a moment the conundrum that any artist critical of capitalism has found themselves in since its rise as the dominant system in 1848:

“Since 1848 every artist unready to be a mere paid entertainer has tried to resist the bourgeoisisation of his finished work, the transformation of the spiritual value of his work into property value. This regardless of his political opinions as such.” (Landscapes p. 46)

Berger lays out how since capitalism reframed art as a commodity to be produced and sold, artists of all political leanings have struggled against this commoditization. Even if you’re not explicitly an anti-capitalist politically, there’s a good chance you still have an intuitive resistance to the commodification of art. Anxiety about “selling out” is such a common concern for artists it’s almost a cliché.

For many artists the commodification of their art feels like a necessary evil. A force that is required for their survival in this system but one that also constantly threatens to undercut the very nature and value of the art itself. Consequently artists frequently try to resist this in their work. Entire movements of art across many mediums have arisen out of the desire to thwart commercialization or to create countercultures, only to find those movements adopted as yet another commodity or absorbed into the dominant culture.

The question we’re asking in this essay isn’t just about the “integrity” of art under capitalism however. Berger establishes art’s struggle against commodification because this issue begs a larger question. Not about art’s ability to fight capitalism per se, but about art’s ability to resist the status-quo at all. In short, can art really act as a revolutionary force? What ability does art really have to challenge the status-quo, to fight oppression, control, fascism, hate, racism, or authoritarianism more broadly?

Against Demanding Propaganda

One response I see to this is to essentially say, “Yes. Art can be revolutionary. I’ll just use my art to promote my political or social message.” It can be very tempting especially for those with strong ideological beliefs to slip into evaluating the worth and quality of art almost exclusively on the basis of whether or not it advances their preferred political message. Berger believed that works of art could serve a social good, and wanted them too, but he also warned that we “must beware of believing that they can always do so directly. You are not simply demanding propaganda.”³

To measure art only by its ability to convey a message is to “demand propaganda.” It’s a pretty common perspective, especially in many online spaces today, but I think it should be avoided because it is an incredibly limiting and frankly, almost pedantic lens through which to view art. It reduces the work of art from something complicated, nuanced, and personal, into a binary based entirely on interpretation. It changes art from something that we like because it challenges us, frees us, or invokes emotion, into something that we like because we agree with it, or dislike because we disagree with it.⁴ It is this way of looking at art and media that’s largely responsible for the increasing inability of some audiences and even critics to distinguish between depiction and endorsement.

While I think understanding and judging the “message” of a work of art for both artists and critics can be an important piece of the puzzle, I’m pretty allergic to any view that reductively turns that into the only or most important way we evaluate art. My upbringing within Evangelical Christianity exposed me to an entire culture that saw art almost exclusively as a means to an end, where that end was spreading a message. And it’s a culture that in my experience, fosters mostly low quality, propagandistic art, often completely stripped of mystery, ambiguity, or inquiry. I often see a similar attitude reflected in many corners of the progressive sphere, its just the message that is different.

When artists confine their view of “quality art” to art that explicitly expresses their message well, it breeds blunt and self-righteous art. It breeds art that mostly appeals to those who already agree with that message, and rarely inspires genuine confrontation or transformation in an audience. And when critics and audiences evaluate art based on its explicit political or social message, it’s a perspective that best serves viral tweets, not the thoughtful, nuanced criticism that deepens our understanding of the works, the world, and ourselves.

“I do not assess the works according to how graphically they present, for example, the plight of our old-age pensioners… Nor am I suggesting that the artist, when actually working, can or should be primarily concerned with the justice of a social cause.” Landscapes. p. 95

But what then are we left with? How does art have revolutionary potential if not through direct political messaging?

The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya

Art’s Truly Revolutionary Capacity

To understand how art can be revolutionary without simply being propaganda, we need to understand what a work of art conveys at its most fundamental level. We tend to think about a work of art, whether it’s a poem, painting or film, in terms of the content. We talk about what happened, the subject matter, and we focus on what those things mean to us. All of this is relevant, and an important part of art’s function, but it is far from art’s most powerful capability.

Beyond content art also conveys something more complicated, something that’s not so easily distilled into the language of interpretation. According to Berger, “What we carry away with us—on the most profound level—is the memory of the artist’s way of looking at the world.” And it’s in that way of looking that art’s truly revolutionary power is found.

This, Berger contends, is how an artist like Goya could paint a massacre in such a way that asserts that massacres should not happen. When we look at The Third of May we don’t see a massacre, we see the way Goya saw a massacre.

From this view, art, and it’s revolutionary capacity, isn’t simply about conveying ideas or statements politically, it’s about conveying perspectives. Berger was particularly interested in art that offered the viewer a perspective that would enable them to better understand and fight for their rights.

Fascism is a political system, and you can attack that political system directly with varying degrees of success. (It is very hard to do this without making an audience with the perspective that leads to fascism raise their defenses.) But fascism is also a political system that is borne out of a way of seeing the world—out of a specific perspective. This perspective is rooted in fear and a desire to tyrannically and violently control others in an attempt to silence those fears. So a different approach to anti-fascist art, the one I believe Berger advocates, is to judge the revolutionary value of art not by how it challenges the political systems and outcomes directly, but through how it convey perspectives that challenge the views that fuel those systems and outcomes.

We must be sensitive to the poetry of this. The transmission of perspective isn’t something that the artist intentionally inserts into their work, it is encoded as a part of the process. It is inherent to the creation of art. Creating art in this way, requires a quiet confidence in the long term value of what you’re doing detached from utilitarian outcomes. This kind of art doesn’t convince people or “win” arguments, it plants seeds that shape ideas, opinions and perspectives, slowly and organically over time. It tends to humanity’s garden.

Revolutionary art brings us into contact with revolutionary ways of seeing the world. Ways of seeing that challenge the status quo. This perspective encourages us to see the influence of art not in immediate utilitarian terms, not in terms of messages, or content, but in terms of how it shapes, and expands the human attitude and perspective across centuries.

You might still assert: these perspectives are not effective enough. Why has this expansion of perspective not brought about the significant change we hope for? Why don’t the documentaries that lay bare war crimes summon peace, and prevent future violence?

One thing to consider is that even if these works feel inadequate, it does not mean that they aren’t having an impact. Perfectionism is the enemy of the good. We should consider that the existence of revolutionary art could be one of the bulwarks standing between us and even greater and more expansive suffering and tyranny than we have now.

But we should also be wary of demanding too much from art. I agree with Berger that art can be revolutionary. And I agree that this revolutionary power is strongest, not through a propagandistic mechanism, but through arts ability to expand our perspective. It is understandable that we want art to shape and change the world for the better. But we cannot expect art to do the work for us. Making art, talking about, and consuming art that contains expansive perspectives that challenge the evils of our time has a value, but that value lies mostly in how that art shapes how we interact with the world itself.

Some of us are compelled to dedicate our lives to art. And that has its place and its value. But there’s also a tendency to hide behind art and media as a way of escaping a need to interact with the visceral world. Art can grow, expand, and increase our empathetic capacity, our compassion, our understanding of the value of human life, but it is still up to us to act from that understanding.

Like Berger I think art that uses the perspective it conveys in ways that are productive for humanity, in ways that increase love, compassion, and understanding, is good. But I’m also slightly wary of reducing art’s value even to its ability to do this. Perhaps art’s full value lies beyond even this ability to shape our perspectives, in something more immediate, intimate, and less understandable.

Art is not just our attempt to decorate, represent, or shape our world, it is a very expression of our existence and our consciousness, with all its messy contradictions. It is our prayers and cries to each other and what lies beyond us. Art gives voice to our hopes and our ideals, but also our nightmares. Must we demand it be more than that to justify its worth?

As Chernov says in 20 Days in Mariupol, “To not document would be impossible.” The film is also a cry for acknowledgement, a demand that we see the victims of this injustice. There is a deep humanity in making the attempt, regardless of the outcome. Not to do so, would be to resign to the inevitability of violence.

Art may or may not change the world for the better, but it is part of our world, and part of us—how we respond to that world. Art is not a rational practice, but a necessary one. I think we lose out when we try to describe or justify its worth in strictly rational terms.

1. I define meaning here simply as being in service of something I see as good, beyond my own success.

2. What are the demands of the times in which we are living? According to Berger:

“Imperialism, European hegemony, the moralities of capitalist Christianity and state-communism, the Cartesian dualism of white reasoning, the practice of constructing ‘humanist’ cultures on a basis of monstrous exploitation - this entire interlocking system is now being challenged… …Those who envisage a different future are obliged to define their position towards this struggle, obliged to choose.” Revolutionary Undoing, Landscapes by John Berger p. 45

3. The ideal critic and the fighting critic p. 95

4. Evaluating art in an agree/disagree binary presupposes that both you and the art already possess the “answers” to whatever mysteries and questions contained within the story/work of art, and that your answers align. Sometimes this is reasonable! But if we limit art to this metric, we create a world where art that doesn’t present a concrete answer, or art that engages with topics that we’re unsure about, is tossed aside because it makes us uncomfortable.