> It's been weird to see the belief growing the last few years that art should (or even can) be apolitical, and an artist's job is to make art uninformed by their political needs.
Interestingly, this is a somewhat old belief. When you read about art history, a lot of these ideas about an artist being apolitical were associated with the classicist tradition and the French Academy, I believe. Later on, when the Impressionists and others challenged these views, they courted controversy for introducing political topics into their artwork in very subtle ways, from the way a woman posed, to what she wore, to even the colors that the painter used. So this is really an old debate that’s been around for a long time.
It later became more of an issue in the 20th century as the old ways of doing art began to be replaced with modern art. I recall reading about it in terms of censorship and the red scare in the 1950s. Remember, before the free speech movement in the early 1960s, artists and writers were frequently attacked by the establishment for addressing political issues, and artists and writers who steered clear of these things were often rewarded and elevated by the then status quo. Those who didn’t stop and challenged the establishment could be blackballed as we saw in Hollywood in the film industry at that time. This also famously applied to artists who tried to address LGBT issues, which were pretty much forbidden and met with punishment.
These people were frequently derided as "agitators" in the popular media of the time, a term that is rarely heard these days. Years before this, musicians like Billie Holiday had tried to address racism in the US, and the FBI went after her and other musicians who tried to raise awareness about the hardships they faced and they destroyed their careers. In many ways, just like today, elements of the US government acted like morality police, and their litmus test was politics. If you were a political artist of any kind, you were put on a watchlist and monitored. My understanding is that this is still true in many countries today.
There’s also the popular and somewhat established conspiracy theory about abstract expressionism. On the one hand, some experts argue that it was a form of soft power to fight communism and to promote the American value of freedom of expression. But I have an altogether different take.
In an earlier period of my life, I spent a lot of time investigating abstract expressionism and immersing myself in it. And I came to the conclusion that it could have been viewed as apolitical in one sense (and psychological in another), which would also work as a propaganda/disinformation tool to disengage the audience from current events and political concerns, in effect fulfilling the goals of its proponents, such as mitigating social and political dissent during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the various cultural issues at the time.
Perhaps this is one reason why, during the height of the post-9/11 period, during two wars, a Great Recession, a housing crisis, an opioid epidemic, and the loss of personal privacy, there was a resurgence of apolitical abstract expressionism in the US. Maybe people were attracted it to because it took their minds off of real issues.
When you spend a lot of time around abstract expressionism, you realize that it acts as a mental palette cleanser of sorts, and diverts your cognitive attention away from political controversy and social concerns. If this truly was a soft weapon as the conspiracy theorists claim, that it could possibly act to pacify people and keep them silent. My take only, of course.