Art is not mimetic. Art is not ‘about’ stuff. Art has no role. Art does not ‘ask questions’. People might do those things, sometimes even people who are artists. But not their art, even if they think it does, even if that was their intention.
Were one to be dramatic, they would decree art the pre-Tower-of-Babel mother tongue (thus terming it ‘autonomous’ misses its essence as all-encompassing source), and politics not even one letter within it. They would point out an iceberg that, in contemporary discourse, had thus been forced to balance on its tip. A dangerous balance indeed. But for now, let’s pretend that all we’re saying is that art and politics are simply two different languages, a distinction too often forgotten in the aforementioned discourse.
