‘Think of all the great art we’ll get from a Trump win…’

Now with Trump returning to the White House, advocates for artistic political resistance are nowhere to be seen. It only took one term of President Trump to quietly rubbish the idea that art will see a resurgence in priority, or that art could even produce real, tangible world change in the first place.

Art is wonderful and can do many things. Altering political systems and influencing the decisions of those who maintain those systems is not one of them.

Of course, there was plenty of art that addressed the Trump presidency. People did try. Emphasis on try. Unfortunately, the majority of it was superficial, sloganised, and drenched in tacky surface-level liberalism. It seems this time around the mood is not one of resistance, in whatever form that may take, but dismay and exhaustion. This time there’s no point in trying.

Read more:

If I may defend throwing soup on Van Goghs and slathering paint on Stonehenge

But where did the idea come from that someone like Trump gaining power would unleash some sort of artistic renaissance? The perception of art as a radical reaction to the current moment stems from the romanticisation of the 1960s, where political art and protest songs stood hand in hand with the social and revolutionary movements of that era.

In time, the idea that the art produced in the 1960s somehow bolstered its mass movements solidified – but these mass movements would have certainly still happened without the cultural image that came to be attached to them. Bring to mind the great works of the 1960s and not much of it will actually be relevant as political commentary on the decade.

Political art in France reached a peak right around the events of May 1968, when activists, students, and protesters effectively shut down France’s economy. But as pressure let off, the economy returned to business as usual, and the small opening for revolution was squashed by state forces. May 1968 is now seen as a failure, unable to achieve any of its long-term objectives.

In times of political conservatism, artists have instead found themselves looking inward, or accepting defeat and assimilating into mainstream culture (very ‘the hippies grew up and voted for Reagan’ coded).

The cautionary tale of the political artist can be seen through master French film director Jean-Luc Godard. The dedicated path he took eventually led him to the same dead end as many of his contemporaries.

Read more:

Jean-Luc Godard: the 20th century giant that changed film forever

Throughout the 1960s, Godard had first revolutionised film’s form, and then as political sentiment became more central, began to use these new forms to dissect and attack political structures. The year before 1968 saw Godard dismantle the bourgeois mindset with Weekend and declare revolutionary intent with La Chinoise. In the 1970s, Godard was one of the few artists to double down on ideology, entirely erasing his authorship in line with Marxist thought and collectivising the creative process.

Still from Jean-Luc Godard's radical 1967 film La Chinoise (Image: Athos Film) By the 1980s, however, the political value of his work was almost non-existent. The decade of ‘me me me’ had infiltrated even the most ardent of revolutionaries. Godard became comfortable with this new individualism, moving his work from the material to the internal. The revolution, in fact, will come from a realisation of the self. Or, at least, that is the conclusion many artists reached on the limits and parameters of art and its influence.

And it’s a sound conclusion, at least where art is concerned. We are long past idyllic, naïve notions of a song changing the world. That sentiment has only revealed itself to be false at conception. There is a consistent overstepping when it comes to the relationship between art and politics as if the two walk together with no friction or conflict. In a way, the link between the two can be quite overstated.

There is also a lessened need to express political sentiment through art. Once discourse is exhausted through social media and other avenues, is there even much energy left to direct it toward an artistic pursuit?

Read more:

We’re stuck in an infinite nostalgia loop… where is the culture of tomorrow?

Art may not be able to directly change the world, or act as effective resistance, but it can still be radical and groundbreaking, inspiring and sparking ideas that can lead to societal and political progress. It can help define and redefine our worldview, and there is much political and social value in well-defined thought-out perspectives.

Art’s radicalism reaches further than the narrow domain of political commentary. It is open-ended, and not always a comment on a material reality. Perhaps art made in Trump’s second term will follow the superficial sloganisation of 2016, but someone, somewhere will react to the current moment in radical ways we don’t quite understand yet.