In 1961, the great physicist Richard Feynman was asked to teach the introductory course in physics at the California Institute of Technology.  He began the course with a scenario that was all too visceral in the duck-and-cover era: the apocalypse is upon us, and you only have time to pass along one sentence of advice to future generations of intelligent life, be they human or otherwise: what do you write to convey the most information in the fewest number of words?  Being a physicist, Feynman’s answer was physics-focused,¹ but as the popular public radio program Radiolab demonstrated when it posed this scenario to a broader cross-section of thinkers and creators, there’s room to conclude he was only joking.

One of the more interesting and surprising responses came from novelist Nicholson Baker,  His (very simple) sentence?  You know more than you can say. As a novelist he is, of course, well aware of the power of words, but precisely because of that gift, he’s also likely more acutely aware of the limits of language than most, of how much understanding and wisdom about the world can never be put into words, indeed dwarfs what can be, and is no less important for that.²

Few areas of human endeavor are more logorific than politics, but Baker’s dictum is no less important to honor.  Which is why we find it disturbing that so much aspersion has been cast, like sparks from a sandpaper wheel, on visual artists, especially fine artists, who seek to bring together their vision and political beliefs.  Indeed, the prevailing point of view in the art world for decades has been that politics debases art and reduces it to agitprop, that the best artists are more “universalist,” not to mention increasingly purely aesthetic (or should we say anesthetic), formal, and abstract in their visions.  Don’t believe us?  Quick: name a museum dedicated to political art.  Besides the one you’re in right now.

We love abstract art, probably a lot more than the next man, woman, and child combined. But anyone with eyes to see can’t help but believe anyone who actually believes political art is merely instrumental rather than essential is either blind, stupid, or just incompetent.  The political art of Picasso, Delacroix, Goya, Velasquez, Manet, Jacques Louis-David, Dali, Van Gogh, Munch, Egon Schiele, Kara Walker, Archibald Motley, Winfred Rembert, Max Ernst, Kathe Kollwitz, Norman Rockwell, Diego Rivera, Banksy, Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey, and so many more… is nothing but agitprop?

It’s ridiculous enough to beg that age-old question: qui bene? Who benefits from denigrating political art as gauche and second-rate, while rewarding its abstraction into increasing inaccessibility to the masses? Who gains when whatever political intent that can’t be suppressed is buried in lengthy expository labels or catalogs nobody reads, or audio guides that typically devolve into background noise like side effects in pharmaceutical ads?  Could it be…. the one-percent?  It could.  Shut up and (draw, paint, sculpt)?

Look, we know the rise of totalitarianism proved that art is no less corruptible than any and everything else totalitarians have despoiled.³  But they’ve only done so (as they reached for their guns) because they understand, as well or better than anyone, the potential political power of art to move the masses.  The totalitarians in our country understand it, too, which is why they keep trying to shrink art down to the size of a matchbox (zeroing out the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in every Trump budget, for example) until they get their bite at the poisoned apple of absolute certainty.  With all that needs changing and the existential threats we face, can we really afford to put down our brushes and Photoshop toolboxes, to unilaterally disarm?   We cannot.

So, QED…The People’s Gallery, and a map to it:

Click on any of the gallery exhibits on the map to visit them!.  More importantly, send us your own creations–we’ve seeded each wing with a few samples we hope will inspire you–or at least compel you to realize you can do better. In fact, we’re counting on it. 

¹ Feynman’s sentence was, in essence, the Atomic Hypothesis: “All things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”  He went on to observe that “In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.” A bit of an understatement, to be sure.

² But let this not be considered a concession, by us or by novelist Baker to thoughtless drivel like “a picture is worth a thousand words” or woo-woo like “music is the universal language.”  In fact, our retort to such claims of audiovisual superiority would be “words penetrate and pass through the fissures in reality that sound and light cannot reach”  Or, as apparently can’t be said often enough: it’s not a competition (and no one is winning).

³ Granted, it has been, almost by definition, a corruption uniquely grotesque and mind-churning.