I have a graduate degree in Museum Studies, nd a lot my research is on the function and history of museums, and art as a whole. The way I think about it is similar: that art is a tool for individuals to communicate, memorialize, and create new vocabulary for ideas.
Art can and have always been a powerful agent of positive change. Some of the most amazing radical activists like Angela Davis and bell hooks have said so, or were themselves artists. That said, art must always be viewed in relation to the system it exists in. That system control much of which art can talk, which artists get a say, and contextualize art work as a whole. Art is never neutral. For example, much of the Western Art-historical canon was established by people in power to legitimize a Western (White) identity-- to connect French monarchy with Italian Renaissance, to the Greeks, and otherize all other cultures. This is a foundation for White Supremacy.
My favorite quote about art which sums it up is by Toni Cade Bambara. You might've heard the phrase "the role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible." It's often out of context:
The task of the artist is determined always by the status and process and agenda of the community that it already serves. If you’re an artist who identifies with, who springs from, who is serviced by or drafted by a bourgeois capitalist class then that’s the kind of writing you do. Then your job is to maintain status quo, to celebrate exploitation or to guise it in some lovely, romantic way. That’s your job…
As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible. One of the ways I attempt to do that is by celebrating those victories within the [B]lack community. And I think the mere fact that we’re still breathing is a cause for celebration. Also, my job is to critique the reactionary behavior within the community and to keep certain kinds of calls out there: the children, our responsibility of children, our responsibility to maintain some kind of continuity from the past. But I think for any artist your job is determined by the community you’re identifying with.
But in this country (US) we’re not encourage and equipped at any particular time to view things that way. And so the artwork or the art practice that sells a capitalist ideology is considered art and anything that deviates from that is considered political propagandist, polemical or didactic, strange, weird, subversive, or ugly.
Toni Cade Bambara interviewed by Kay Bonetti, 1982
