Art and Politics
CrowdSource 8.18.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Star Wars. Superman. Radiohead (sorry). And … politics.
Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.
Note: CrowdSource is taking a late-summer break. We will be back on September 8! Podcasting will continue as normal!
Allusive Figures
British band Radiohead has released a live version of their 2003 album, Hail to the Thief, and it’s a surprise hit.
Protest Music. With its allusions to nuclear bunkers and George Orwell, album was originally conceived as a poetical protest against George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror.
Theater Music. Recently, the album inspired a Hamlet revival by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Gaza. The release of this political work comes in a moment when both Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and guitarist/composer Jonny Greenwood face public scrutiny over their refusal to join cultural boycotts against Israel.
Synchronicity. Incidentally, the Global War on Terror is back, according to the fine folks at the
.
What Makes Art Political?
That new Radiohead album, as well as discussions about the Star Wars miniseries Andor and debates over the new Superman movie, all address this question, directly or indirectly.
About Andor:
Is Andor Left-Wing? Tony Gilroy, the Andor showrunner, explains how political ideas fit into his work:
I think it would probably be just as confusing for you to try to make a left-right marker on it. But I feel the disruption of community, and the destruction of community — whether it’s on a large scale with colonialism, if it’s on a small scale with a city, in a town or a family — the Empire in the show is consuming and destroying communities everywhere.
Morality is Not Politics. Historian
reflects on Gilroy’s comment: “Gilroy is right to say that he is a ‘moralist,’ not a political filmmaker. What he’s describing is a generic moral impulse that could be and has been mobilized in left-wing politics, but could every bit equally drive conservative or reactionary politics.”
Gilroy Did His Best Within a Very Limiting Genre. So says Gabriel Winslow Yost: “The point is not that Andor fails in its effort to depict political violence but rather that, for all the show’s intelligence and skill and ingenuity, major elements of its subject are simply incompatible with its nature. What it depicts most clearly is what Star Wars can’t show.”
Superman Agonistes:
Superman is Not Woke, argues
, while adding: “The notion that movies were ever a shining realm of apolitical bliss is pure nonsense to anyone whose cinematic diet includes more than memes.”Superman Would Support Palestine, writes friend of Wisdom of Crowds
: “Because if right and wrong are universal, then what would happen had Kal-El landed in Grozny, or Urumqi, or Gaza?”“My Problem With Superman.” A searching essay by novelist
:
Superman, like the nation that created him, contains many contradictory stories, but the question that all of us always must face is: Which ones will we listen to? The stories that thrillingly imprison us in the fantasy of our annihilating exceptionalism? The stories of alien invaders and avenging oneself in endless fractious war? Or the stranger stories that remind us how vulnerable we all are, how much we need one another’s help?
Can Political Art Be Good?
Scattered bits of recent commentary bearing on this question:
“The Test of Politically Themed Art” lies in whether it unsettles the audience, according to fantasy novelist
in his review of Christopher Scalia’s new book, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read): “[The work of art] fails if its vision looks like just so much cardboard to anyone who differs with its worldview. It succeeds not through conversion but through unsettlement …”Right-Wing Art is Art Created by Right-Wing Artists. So says right-wing publisher
: “If you truly believe that your worldview, and how that manifests as politics, was accurate … then you wouldn’t need to coerce your creative output into alignment with it.”Novelists Shouldn’t Do Politics. Novelist
stirred the pot with this thread:
Rendering Politics Aesthetic v. Politicizing Art
From a resonant 1935 essay by German philosopher Walter Benjamin:
“Fiat ars — pereat mundus” [“Let art be created, though the world perishes”] says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art” [“art for art’s sake”]. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
From the Crowd
Responses concerning the violence in our hearts and the soldiers in our streets.
“Remember Dresden!” New subscriber
responds to last week’s CrowdSource, about post-globalization predictions:
I am fairly new here, and I have to say I am really enjoying your Substack.
Regarding Dresden (and barbarism, for that matter), I remember a student who sat behind me in a political theory class with an open laptop plastered with stickers. During break, while he was out of the room, I turned around to get a look at them. Among many was an Antifa logo, a trans flag, and a “Remember Dresden!” one where the font was engulfed in high, blazing flames.
He was a smart kid — incredibly smart. Nerdy, overweight. I imagined how he would fare if civilization crumbled and he got a chance to live out what I imagined was his fantasy of fighting fascists. Some of the soldiers that I know seem to be at least fascist-adjacent. They are conservative, disciplined, former athletes who respond quickly to authority (coaches, superior officers ... some of them to Trump).
In my musings, I thought he would instantly regret it if there were real violence. Then I remembered Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other wars where the most powerful militaries were driven out by rag-tag guerrillas. Maybe he wouldn’t fare so badly ...
In any case, I felt sure that in that young man’s heart was violence, just as there is violence in the hearts of so many among us: that stone-faced stranger passing us on the street, that group of outcasts huddled together in the back of class, Mike Huckabee.
Let us pray and believe it, indeed.
See you in September!
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