Anchorhead said:
Vaderisnothayden said:
Political discussion is not the purpose of art ....
Incorrect.
Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera, Käthe Kollwitz, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, U2, Roger Waters, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Josef Thorak, Ernst Barlach, and hundreds of others throughout history.
Just because people have discussed politics in works of art doesn't in any way make political discussion the purpose of art in general. Art is for deeper things than mere political discussion.
Political discussion may be the consciously intended purpose behind an individual work of art, but there's always more going on in a work of art than the conscious intentions, and the intentions of individual artists do not set the general overall purpose of art in general. The purpose of art in general is not decided by what some individual artist or artists think. It's decided by the nature of art and how it works and what it is and what inside us it comes from. Any sort of artist who thinks their work is first and foremost for politics is misguided and doesn't fully understand their own art. But then artists rarely understand their art, because art is founded on what goes on deep inside ourselves, stuff that's not so easy to consciously understand.