All Film Is Popcorn

but who cares.

I read an article a while back that started by declaring that “All art is political”. I asked the online avatars of my Facebook friends if they think this is true. Some said no, of course not, others were confident that yes, it was. Something about the idea bothered me, but I didn’t have a clear idea why.

In one sense it is true that art and politics can’t be completely separated because art changes the way that the person engaging with the work feels and perceives the world and their relation to it, and this has repercussions in the political realm. For example, in 17th century England, one of the only countries at the time with somewhat widespread literacy, popular books about the lives of slaves in the Americas had an important role in the rise of the movement in that country to abolish the slave trade.

In another sense though, not all art is political, obviously. No one goes to see a Van Gogh exhibit or a Grateful Dead concert to ponder capital gains tax, the federal budget, or how evil you would have to be to build approximately one hundred gratuitous, obscene speed bumps on 52nd Street—which, sans bumps, is objectively the best road to take to get across town. The reason to go to a concert or gallery is, in many cases, exactly to get away from pondering these things, and other practical concerns, both personal and societal.

I think everyone agrees that some art is political. I gave one example and it’s not hard to think of many more. It’s just that the interesting cases are examples that are not overtly political. A work of art that doesn’t lead you into thinking of the political, but maybe is just engaging, and gives you a sense of wonder and beauty, is what the debate is about. If you insist that all art is political, a case like this leads you to argue that it must be political in nature to have moments in your life when all your attention is engaged with something that is outside of your everyday material concerns. To me, I don’t know what could be more non-political than that, besides being asleep or dead.

In these cases “all art is political” only in the sense that everything has consequences. Anything that happens changes the way the world is in the future. A painting exists and that changes humans in some way, and those changes effect the politics of those humans in some way. But why should that be the thing that defines what art is? Why equate art with politics simply because we live in a world where changes occur over time?

The defining characteristic of a lot of art, as we experience it, is a sensory experience that pulls us away from our ordinary mental world. The fact that this has political consequences is secondary. Movies have consequences for popcorn production, that does not mean that we need to go around insisting that “All film is popcorn”.