There is no longer non-political art.

There is no longer non-political art.

We cannot afford a commercial system that exploits our labor.

We cannot subsidize an academic system that exploits our knowledge.

The critic is complicit in the world as it exists.

The Contemporary has come to an end. We cannot be obsessed with the present. The present has failed us and we have failed it. We must look to the future. We must gather our resources and bend all energies toward envisioning and realizing that future.

We must embrace respect, trust and affectionate play. Love.

We must unlock doors and invite people in and share our space, time and knowledge. There is not scarcity but abundance. There is not isolation but unarticulated connection.

We cannot wait for someone else to do this. No one else will do this but ourselves.

“To find a solution to this impasse through art itself is impossible. It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology. Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably – as Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of a culture founded on slavery – unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character. For these reasons the function of art in our epoch is determined by its relation to the revolution.
[…]

In very much the same way, to repeat, a progressive movement occurs in art. When an artistic tendency has exhausted its creative resources, creative “splinters” separate from it, which are able to look at the world with new eyes. The more daring the pioneers show in their ideas and actions, the more bitterly they oppose themselves to established authority which rests on a conservative “mass base,” the more conventional souls, skeptics, and snobs are inclined to see in the pioneers, impotent eccentrics or “anemic splinters‚” But in the last analysis it is the conventional souls, skeptics and snobs who are wrong – and life passes them by.
[…]

Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself. Poets, painters, sculptors and musicians will themselves find their own approach and methods, if the struggle for freedom of oppressed classes and peoples scatters the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind.”

Leon Trotsky
Partisan Review, 1938
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