The Beautiful Protest
Our aesthetic expectations of political art.
A few weeks ago I was in a group conversation with art collectors, most of which are supporters of contemporary art organizations. Our discussion centered on how artists are responding to the current political climate, with a particular focus on the role art institutions should play in supporting them.
Here one of the collectors got a bit uncomfortable, and tried to venture to say something that he knew was problematic and didn’t know how to articulate properly. “Some friends of mine—he said— are questioning this kind of work — not that we should not support it, but they are asking why can’t we also give support to art that is also compelling on aesthetic grounds.” His comment along the lines of “people are saying”, felt to me both like a way to distance himself from something that he was also feeling, but at the same asking for help to find language to defend current political art practices that he knew were important defending.
The concern surfaced by that collector irked me at first, but then brought me to ask questions to myself about what we seek to accomplish when making politically engaged art.
I have been fascinated with the subject of beauty vs. ugliness since I was 16, when I once came to my high school art teacher pompously telling him that I was “developing a theory” of ugliness in art. He laughed at my face: “That is an idea from the 1930s!” I didn’t know at the time that the antagonism toward beauty was in fact an important trait of the avant-garde, starting with Dada and going through German Expressionism, abex, and so forth up to and including postmodernism.
Beauty remains one of the most contentious terms in contemporary art discourse. For some, the skepticism toward beauty arises from the implicit notion that visually appealing artwork can encourage complacency, discourage introspection, and risk being relegated to mere decoration.
Years after that high school exchange, while working in museums in Chicago, I encountered a related sentiment that stayed with me. The director of the museum where I worked—at the time hosting a solo exhibition of Richard Misrach’s photographs—joked, “The works are so beautiful that you sometimes wonder if it’s contemporary art.”
Throughout my years a museum educator one of the challenges I constantly faced was helping visitors understand that the aim of great art should not be exclusively to offer gratuitous visual pleasure, but to also provoke thinking and, when necessary, be uncomfortable and disruptive. I tried several times to show newcomers to art that this discomfort could lead to enjoyable intellectual stimulation, which in some way could be understood as finding beauty in the ideas conveyed, or even in the beautiful visual representation of something hideous (like the works of Cindy Sherman, a master at dealing with such duality).
And ugliness has been particularly present in my mind these days because of the recent dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. The connection between USAID and ugliness might seem strange, until you know the story behind this agency.
In 1958, the novel The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer made a significant impact on the upper echelons of the U.S. government. The book offered a harsh critique of American diplomacy in Southeast Asia, portraying a grim perspective on how Americans were perceived abroad. President John F. Kennedy was reportedly so influenced by its message that he ensured every U.S. senator received a copy. The book is widely believed to have contributed to the establishment of the Peace Corps and played a crucial role in the creation of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While the U.S. already had several foreign aid programs at the time, USAID marked a more coordinated and strategic approach to international assistance, aiming to enhance both effectiveness and the nation's global image.
The current dismantling of this agency, coupled with the administration’s new wave of isolationism—alongside erratic imperialist fantasies such as acquiring Greenland, annexing Canada, or reclaiming the Panama Canal—suggests a troubling disregard for America's global reputation. If the image of "the ugly American" never entirely disappeared, it now seems poised for a resurgence.
The varieties of artistic responses during dark times can be put in three categories. The first is the testimonial approach. Ugly times call for ugly art, and many will simply make works that document the dark night of the soul that we are undergoing just as Max Beckmann did when he painted The Night a century ago.
During the institutional critique period and after, there were those who took an unsentimental approach, firm in the belief that self-indulgent political art needs to cede its way to engaging the audience critically, often through a mix of aesthetic appeal and alienation techniques just as Brecht did with theater. Artists that show us the way include Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Hans Haacke and Tania Bruguera, among many others.
And the third category, connecting now with the question of beauty, include those who felt that the aforementioned critical stance should not preclude them either from also creating works that are deeply sensorially rich. I am thinking of artists like Guadalupe Maravilla, whose commitment to social causes and his activism does not preclude him to produce visually powerful works. “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty”, a phrase attributed to Thomas Jefferson, could be paraphrased thus: when ugliness becomes law, rebellion becomes beauty.
And this is a spectrum of artistic engagement that I hope those who are nervous about supporting political art today, in any of its garden varieties, may appreciate.
This was a welcome (and useful) thing to encounter this morning! Thank you.