The curtains aren’t just blue: why art cannot be apolitical

Contemporary aestheticism distinguishes politics from beauty, and this is a mistake.

The National Gallery, in its May 2025 redisplay, declared that its paintings will not be made political, in favour of honoring “some of the great figures of the canon.” Of course, this suggests that the figures of the canon were immune to politics. To then assume that art can be politicised prompts the question as to whether art, in its original state, is apolitical. I would argue not.

The contention lies in how we define ‘political’. It’s not that I think all art is created with a politically revolutionary purpose. Truthfully, I believe it would be tiresomely repetitive to only express overt comments of political parties and mentions very little about policymakers. Though art can be political by propaganda and explicit activism, it is most political by simply framing the social climate. By ‘political’ I do not mean good or bad, patriotism or wokeness. When a photography student captures the landscape of urban Park Circus, they document the lifestyle of an affluent Glaswegian class. A rapidly changing age of technological modernisation and environmental crisis. A snippet of Glasgow, embellished with electric Tesla cars and plastic cigarette butts. It all conglomerates, piecing together a snapshot of the social disparity in Scotland’s largest city and the governmental failure to effectively confront an environmental crisis which are, unsurprisingly, political.

In a 2008 interview with Poets & Writers magazine, novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison said: “Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’”

Morrison refers to the creator as inseparable to their identity, individual and collective; an artist cannot be classless nor raceless. An artist doesn’t have to be deliberately political for their art to be perceived as such. From Pepe the frog to Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance, image and performance will continuously elicit the inadvertently political, goad the ambiguously political. An artist may deny that their art is apolitical, but this doesn’t necessarily stand. Your writing is inherently political in its exhibition of experience and your photos are political in its presentation of identity. In the sense that a 21st-century painter is fathered by the Anthropocene, a privately educated songwriter is mothered by the constituency they grew up in. The focus, which Morrison reiterates, is that ideology is intrinsically embedded in representation, perception, and, as a consequence, artwork. The artistic mind is, unavoidably, a product of one’s environment. Your voice is shaped by social background, moulded by economic advantages, and fashioned by political consequence.

It is under oppressive regimes and fascist political parties that art is targeted first. In the 20th century, we see literary censorship and biblioclasm, with Nazi Germany burning the works of Jewish writers in May 1933, and anti-communist books banned during the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong. If not to erase the politics within art, then what? Meanwhile, the 1981 Burning of Jaffna Public Library in Sri Lanka eradicated one of the largest homes of Tamil history and culture. Artistic erasure has long been fuelled by political agenda. History agrees that the arts are inherently political in its exhibition of experience and identity.

Similar artistic suppression is pervasive in other mediums, too. During the 2025 Oscars, No Other Land won Best Documentary Feature Film, an Israeli-Palestinian documentary, raw and realistic, highlighting the displacement of the Palestinian population. But despite being critically acclaimed, its lack of distribution deals have hindered its exposure. In short, the problem is that it is ‘too’ political. The documentary represents an art form that is assembled from historical and cultural fragments, ultimately left in the shadows, under the authority of a political superior. Art, in its essence, cannot be apolitical and this is only enhanced by the determination of state involvement. 

Julianne Moore’s children’s book Freckleface Strawberry, for example, is not the standard type of banned literature. If anything, it tells us that political discourse is not restricted to social critique or blatant allegory. Moore’s storybook outlines a young girl who understands that her freckles are different from her peers, but gradually grows to accept them for their uniqueness. Amidst the tightening DEI clampdown, however, the Trump Administration removed the picture book from schools. Freckle discrimination and body dysmorphia? The left are at it again. 

I do not claim that art and politics are synonymous, interchangeable with absolutely no distinction. However, political control knows no territorial boundaries. The books we read, the films we watch, the graffiti we walk past all capture politics when they mimic reality. When the body operates in a capitalistic network that cannot be bypassed, it produces an artistic expression of such, whether it is conscious of this or not. This distinction between art and life wavers and warps and we find that we are not immune to politics, and neither is the art we create. It may seem contradictory to perceive art as entertaining or beautiful when politics is not, but it is a privilege in itself to assert art as apolitical. To reject the prominence of politics within art in favour of escapism and leisure ultimately perpetuates the timeless negligence of social apathy and moral ignorance. A familiar history of political desensitization is once more repeated — we scorn the anthropogenic damage in Finding Nemo and cry at corrupt power politics in The Lion King, only to reduce our childhood favourites to aesthetic animation.