Everyone agreed, though, that "all art is political" and anyone who doesn't think so is an idiot and a rube.
This phrase has been attributed to lots of people, but it seems to have become common usage in the latter half of the 20th century, although playwright Elmer Rice puts the phrase in the mouth of a character in 1935. The first half of the 20th seems to have preferred "all art is propaganda" which means something a little different. Hilariously, the "political" version is often (?) attributed to Toni Morrison, who phrased it as "all good art is political" in 2008, which is a bit late and also she's talking about "good art" to give herself an escape route — if it turns out not to be political, well, perhaps it's just bad.
But what does the sentence mean?
Syntactically, it means that art (whatever that is) is inevitably somehow related to power. It depends, as Bill Clinton might say, on what "is" is.
Rice's play puts the line into the mouth of a man who, if I read the notes correctly, feels that Art is a tool of revolution, a tool for creating a classless society. This is not, I confess, a position that makes a lot of sense to me. Berger's "Art and Revolution" which talks about Neizvestny's work as a specific and deliberate tool of anti-Soviet revolution, but this seems to be about a specific body of work rather than a blanket statement about the nature of Art? It's been a while since I read it, and there may be some broader statements buried in it.
Some people clearly mean that art makes some sort of statement about power, this is what Toni Morrison meant in 2008 (she clarified.) The earlier "propaganda" form, as used by people like Orwell, makes this more definite (but see below on Orwell specifically.) "Propaganda" is a noun, "political" is an adjective. What "is" is is inherently clearer in the noun case than the adjective case.
To be fair, a lot of people seem to buy into the "well, Art is a social thing, and society is shaped by, steeped in, the political, so Art is political" and this is what they say. This is a dumb thing to say, and is transparently an effort to rescue the sentence from being meaningless. Everything human is political in this sense, you might as well say "furniture is political" and if you did these people would probably say "yes! Yes it is!" and then we can move on with our lives.
When Morrison was saying is that all art in fact makes political statements. Art directly makes comment on, passes judgement on, the power structures that shape human society. This is a very bold statement, and is on the face of it pretty obviously false unless we extend "political" so far as to make the thing meaningless (see above.) Morrison's remark in full attempts to rescue itself by remarking that art which neglects to comment is, in fact, commenting in favor of the status quo. This is the po-mo shuffle "if it doesn't talk about X, it points to X by the very absence of X in the text and is therefore about X" which reduces trivially to "everything is about everything" and again we can just move on with our lives.
The fact that Morrison simultaneously temporized in a completely separate direction by qualifying her subject as good art suggests to me that she knew she was on pretty shaky ground here.
Orwell, saying that Art is propaganda, makes a more credible point. His remark applies mainly to novelists (he's talking about Dickens) and while he says "Art" it's not at all clear that he's thinking about painting. His assertion is that Art (novels) are a product of society and therefore bear, inevitably, the marks of that society and as a subset of that, the power structures of it. He seems to be laying the thing out the other way around. He's not asserting that all Art explicitly talks about politics, but rather that the politics around the Art (novel) can be observed in the thing. This is pretty reasonable and while nearly tautological, is to my eye a mildly interesting remark.
To summarize:
- Art might be a tool for political change, a tool of revolution. But surely not all art.
- Art might comment or judge politically, which is either "not all art" or po-mo nonsenes.
- The political context of Art might be read in the piece. Ok, no complaint.
- Art is just like every other human thing and is political because. True, but uninteresting.
It is certainly true that a very great deal of art is and was political! Loads of it! There are entire swathes of human history in which the role of Art was pretty exclusively to glorify some power structure! Frequently, Art made and still makes pretty pointed negative comments on existing power structures (Aristophanes was making fun of politicians more than 2000 years ago!) Today, people make portraits of Trump out of cheetos, and that's definitely a political statement.
But, to be honest, I don't see any specific reason that any specific piece of Art necessarily makes a political comment. It is in fact possible for Art to simply be pretty (maybe that's not very good art, but whatever) and it's definitely possible for Art to be merely emotionally evocative, to move the spirit, to enlarge the soul, blah blah blah, without making any specific political comment.
Consider also that politics changes around a piece of Art. What would it mean to notice a beautiful piece, which made a powerful and clear political remark, the content of which is now lost to us? All those Ancient reliefs on various objects and buildings told stories, often political, and I doubt that we even know what many of them are referring to. Are the mysterious ones still political? Maybe they're just pretty? Or evocative?
Being able to discern the local politics in a piece of Art, well, that makes sense and resolves the question of changing politics: Art always bears the marks of the politics surrounding it's making, and possibly, like a mirror, reflects the politics of the moment in which we examine it. But there is no necessary statement in a piece of Art.
You might say "all saddles are equestrian" which is interesting, especially if you just dug up a thing that might be a saddle at an archeological site. These people rode horses! Saddles, however, do not specifically extoll the virtues of horses and, as a rule, have nothing to say about equestrianism. A saddle that decorated with an inscription reading "I fucking love horses!" is, in addition to being a saddle, also equestrian in a different way.
