essay on art and power

Why art has the power to change the world

"Art can motivate people to turn thinking into doing." Image:  Studio Olafur Eliasson

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Olafur Eliasson

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} Arts and Culture is affecting economies, industries and global issues

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One of the great challenges today is that we often feel untouched by the problems of others and by global issues like climate change, even when we could easily do something to help. We do not feel strongly enough that we are part of a global community, part of a larger we . Giving people access to data most often leaves them feeling overwhelmed and disconnected, not empowered and poised for action. This is where art can make a difference. Art does not show people what to do, yet engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make the world felt . And this felt feeling may spur thinking, engagement, and even action.

As an artist I have travelled to many countries around the world over the past 20 years. On one day I may stand in front of an audience of global leaders or exchange thoughts with a foreign minister and discuss the construction of an artwork or exhibition with local craftsmen the next. Working as an artist has brought me into contact with a wealth of outlooks on the world and introduced me to a vast range of truly differing perceptions, felt ideas, and knowledge. Being able to take part in these local and global exchanges has profoundly affected the artworks that I make, driving me to create art that I hope touches people everywhere.

Most of us know the feeling of being moved by a work of art, whether it is a song, a play, a poem, a novel, a painting, or a spatio-temporal experiment. When we are touched, we are moved; we are transported to a new place that is, nevertheless, strongly rooted in a physical experience, in our bodies. We become aware of a feeling that may not be unfamiliar to us but which we did not actively focus on before. This transformative experience is what art is constantly seeking.

I believe that one of the major responsibilities of artists – and the idea that artists have responsibilities may come as a surprise to some – is to help people not only get to know and understand something with their minds but also to feel it emotionally and physically. By doing this, art can mitigate the numbing effect created by the glut of information we are faced with today, and motivate people to turn thinking into doing.

Source: Studio Olafur Eliasson

Engaging with art is not simply a solitary event. The arts and culture represent one of the few areas in our society where people can come together to share an experience even if they see the world in radically different ways. The important thing is not that we agree about the experience that we share, but that we consider it worthwhile sharing an experience at all. In art and other forms of cultural expression, disagreement is accepted and embraced as an essential ingredient. In this sense, the community created by arts and culture is potentially a great source of inspiration for politicians and activists who work to transcend the polarising populism and stigmatisation of other people, positions, and worldviews that is sadly so endemic in public discourse today.

Art also encourages us to cherish intuition, uncertainty, and creativity and to search constantly for new ideas; artists aim to break rules and find unorthodox ways of approaching contemporary issues. My friend Ai Weiwei, for example, the great Chinese artist, is currently making a temporary studio on the island of Lesbos to draw attention to the plight of the millions of migrants trying to enter Europe right now and also to create a point of contact that takes us beyond an us-and-them mentality to a broader idea of what constitutes we . This is one way that art can engage with the world to change the world.

Little Sun , a solar energy project and social business that I set up in 2012 with engineer Frederik Ottesen, is another example of what I believe art can do. Light is so incredibly important to me, and many of my works use light as their primary material. The immaterial qualities of light shape life. Light is life. This is why we started Little Sun.

On a practical level, we work to promote solar energy for all – Little Sun responds to the need to develop sustainable, renewable energy by producing and distributing affordable solar-powered lamps and mobile chargers, focusing especially on reaching regions of the world that do not have consistent access to an electrical grid. At the same time, Little Sun is also about making people feel connected to the lives of others in places that are far away geographically. For those who pick up a Little Sun solar lamp, hold it in their hands, and use it to light their evening, the lamp communicates a feeling of having resources and of being powerful. With Little Sun you tap into the energy of the sun to power up with solar energy. It takes something that belongs to all of us – the sun – and makes it available to each of us. This feeling of having personal power is something we can all identify with. Little Sun creates a community based around this feeling that spans the globe.

I am convinced that by bringing us together to share and discuss, a work of art can make us more tolerant of difference and of one another. The encounter with art – and with others over art – can help us identify with one another, expand our notions of we, and show us that individual engagement in the world has actual consequences. That’s why I hope that in the future, art will be invited to take part in discussions of social, political, and ecological issues even more than it is currently and that artists will be included when leaders at all levels, from the local to the global, consider solutions to the challenges that face us in the world today.

Olafur Eliasson is one of the recipients of this year's Crystal Awards , presented at the Annual Meeting in Davos . You can follow him on Twitter via @olafureliasson

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The Power of Art Essay

Introduction, functions of art in the society, effects on political economy, creative industries and information society, function of art as aesthetic and expressing emotions, reference list.

Art could be referred as an expression of individual experience, the way world is understood, valued, observed and celebrated. The traditional method of classifying art has mostly been based on the products.

Artworks are identified in terms of inherent features found in them either as phenomena or objects. That approach leads to generic categorizations which are observed in drama centre, conservatorium, and art schools. Whatever is referred as ‘the arts’ currently, sometimes back they were essential part of daily life (Freeland 2002:8).

Freeland has analyzed various philosophers and there contribution to different forms of art through their theories. His work focuses on history of art when it had no value until currently.

His work therefore focuses the value of art and attempts to answer the ambiguous question what art is and its meaning. In different dialects, no word could be used to collectively explain the range of creative activities. As a result of specialization this led to division of labor during industrial revolution, as a result, there was a specified time when one could identify that the arts were professional undertakings.

The art was separated from the other life activities and became significant to some people. There are many critics involved in this field in an attempt to analyze the real value of art.

Plato who was a known philosopher was among the first to explore the field of art. His work criticized poetry particularly focusing poets originating from his city.

Plato viewed poetry and arts negatively as opposed to Aristotle who developed a theory on aesthetic basing his arguments on Plato’s ideas. Aristotle concurs with Plato that art had a deep impact on someone’s emotions.

Plato argued that the fears and passions which are experienced by audiences during dreadful performances could affect their personality. On the other, hand Aristotle claims that such emotions never corrupt but they cleanse. Therefore, the view of Plato on poetry is a contrast of Aristotle’s concept. Platonic concept has a noticeable influence on Western civilization.

Mainly it has focused on certain era in history, in an attempt to introduce some cultural strategies to transform cultural policy. His work challenges the Puritan attack around 1642 together with theatre prohibition in England.

His work is diversified; Plato also caused a great impact on the understanding of poetry in the Western. This was when Plato invented the theory of poetical inspiration which brought about an outstanding change (Belfiore 2006:231).

Belfiore has been involved in art work for a long time being the head of international cultural policy. Her work discusses on social impact of arts and its position in the cultural policy. In addition, her work challenges the claims which had been made earlier concerning the effect of art on the society and individual.

Therefore, her work remains important until today because it explains the power of art and fights for its success. There are other theorists who also explored the function of art for instance, Carey who was a professor of art and also depicted as a critic.

His work argues that Literature is superior as compared to other arts. His work criticizes some sources of art and challenges their contribution to the modern society.

His work also challenges some literary sources because they appear to be vague and insignificant.Carey claims that literature does not entail just a feeling of pleasure as in painting or music which does not portray the difficult part of art. Further argues that it’s only literature which can instill good morals.

However Carey to some extent values art and reports that it expresses emotions such as anger, fear and desire (Carey 2005: 36). Hence there are different views on the function of arts as discussed by critics from the past decades until presently. The paper focuses on the power of art by assessing the function of art in the society.

Creative arts (arts and media) consist of various sectors which were initially called cultural industries. These sectors include literature, visual arts and those arts which are performed.

There has been drastic change in the government in terms of their attitude towards culture and creativity. Creative industry is a term which has been commonly used as a form of rebranding culture. Cultural industry was originally used to mean commercial entertainment such as recorded music, film, and publishing (Garnham 2005:19).

Intellectual property enables people to appreciate the products from their own creativity. This ensures that one has some goods or products to sell which enables one to exercise moral and economic rights over those products.

Garnham reports that in United Kingdom, copyright is currently regarded as the major organizing principle in creative industries and it defines the cultural industries.

Various types of creative activities such as engineering, academia and science generate intellectual property. Policy discourse includes copyright industries, knowledge industries and intellectual property industries.

The policy discourse covers the media and the arts which are referred as the creative industries. The policy issues involved in this research were established several centuries in the disciplines of art and media. In the past, there was an obvious demarcation between arts policy and arts and commerce, and policy related to mass media (Garnham 2005:19).

Thus there was provision of popular or mass culture, and the main issues were pluralism and press freedom, security of national film industry, and the management and provision of public service broadcasting.

In United Kingdom, there was division of responsibility of the policy between Press industry and Department of Trade. Concerning the broadcasting and press policy, the development involved several Royal Commissions for Public Inquiries and press broadcasting. Mobilization of the term cultural industries to creative industries led to redrawing of various boundaries (Selwood 2000: 59).

They included redefinitions of the foundations, instruments and purposes of the policy. Those changes caused economic arguments which are related to dynamics and the structure of the industries, their position and comparative weight within the economy, and so the relationship between industrial and economic policy and cultural policy.

The shift of creative industry from culture industry was motivated by certain political context which remains to be historical. In addition, it led to different focuses concerning the policy issue during early 1980s.

This involved a shift from state to the industry with extensive assortment of public provision. That describes the reinforcement and the shift to managerial and economic patterns and language of thought in media and cultural policy (Garnham 2005:22).

Great art discloses the importance of age in terms of, who produced the art and when. Hence it is essential to consider who initiated the creativity art and when in order to understand how it influenced the form.

For instance, Mona Lisa which portrays the creativity and beauty of art was produced by Leonardo. This depicts the value placed on beauty and grace by Italians during Renaissance. It’s evident that Leonardo was a scientific observer mainly the nature, self-directed thinker, imaginative pioneer and more so brilliant artist.

Most importantly, his work illustrated important concept of Renaissance which yielded to the current perception of individualism. To some extent, the charisma of Leonardo art indicates that it was produced by one of the pioneer who was regarded as creative genius in relation to contemporary sense.

Leonardo sacrificed a lot of time working on the art; it took many decades to finish despite the fact that it was carried everywhere. No wonder it had the same fascination to many viewers and finally was placed in Paris museum. Finally it was recognized as part of French and Italian culture (Lewis 2008:5).

Women’s images were omnipresent in America during the past century, everything was decorated. This was done through sculptures and paintings; they were involved in extensive and diverse activities which showed different identities.

This depicted how they developed from symbolic and mythical nature to contemporary. Around 1870s, they painted nude women and others such as Ariadne who was acting a certain myth. In 1880s there were more poetic materials which predominated for instance, popular evidence is the book called ‘American Figure Painters’ (Hook 1996:1).

Most of those paintings displayed woman as allegorical subjects and the titles used were evocative to show how women occupied an ideal or symbolic realm. The arts represented the feminine gender and how they were viewed by American society during 19 th century.

Idealized women paintings acted as sites of several interconnected artistic, historical, societal and cultural discourses. Those images could satisfy the artist’s meaning for art, and none of the other subjects could since their female complement were viewed to occupy a position which was similar to art itself (Hook 1996:7).

Cultural Industries (Arts and media) and Culture

The idea of culture industry was first observed in academic, later in policy and political discourse around 1960s. That return originated from a resurgence of Western Marxism which concentrated on hegemony and ideology, and the reinstitution of Frankfurt School and generally cultural turn.

Sociologically, that shifted concentration from assessment of class divisions and social structure to cultural analysis. Social cohesion was by then described according to common belief systems, social domination according to cultural supremacy and social struggles were never associated with economic power and material allocation, but was viewed as struggle between identity groups and sub cultures for legitimation and recognition.

Nevertheless, the term cultural industry which was applied by that time did not signify replay of Frankfurt School. This was because it did not reflect the superior, cultural pessimism observed in Frankfurt School or even the unique version of Marxist economics which underpinned it.

Moreover, there was replacement of traditional working class politics which were founded on production with cultural politics. Oppositional political practice also shifted from trade unions, factories and political parties to the rock concert, the home and mainly the classrooms.

To some extent, that position was connected to decisive rejection of cultural pessimism of Frankfurt School and commercial social democratic critique.

That was mostly in American commercial, culture which favored positive revaluation, popular culture and treasonable decoding authority of audience.

In addition, cultural industries led to emergence of a rival school dealing with analysis, it was later called political economy school. Those analysts originated from media studies and individuals who had participated in assessment of social democratic policy of film, the press and broadcasting industries (Galloway and Dunlop 2007:20).

Creative arts have mainly caused a difference on cultural practices. It has eliminated class divisions and social organizations which brought divisions. As a result, social cohesion has been achieved through common cultural beliefs and distribution of resources hence more understanding and growth.

Concerning political economy, cultural industries emphasized on the unique nature of dynamics and economic structure of the cultural sector. This originated from immaterial or symbolic nature of the products associated with cultural sector.

That assessment has been very significant during 1980s to 1990s when the liberalizing, deregulatory wave affected the British media sector.

This led to some pertinence in a motion about broadcasting regulation and public service broadcasting defense which led to approval of Broadcasting Act in 2003 and instituting of regulatory body Ofcom.

As a result, cultural industries or sector were characterized by increased costs of production which were fixed and minimal to almost zero marginal costs of distribution and reproduction (Myerscough 1988:87). This favored audience maximization, economies of scale, and horizontal and vertical concentration.

In, addition, the demand was unpredictable because the information had to be new to maintain value, hence the consumers and producers could not foretell what they wanted.

The large corporations were favored since they had enough money to operate through economies of scale. Moreover, the cost of marketing increased in proportion to total cost (Howkins 2001:91).

The market strategies which were developed to control the endemic problem focused on; the structure, and regulation of the entire sector and most significant indirect funding through advertisement.

Therefore the debate of state intervention, privatization and regulation of cultural sector, price mechanism strategies could not apply. In addition, the issue of intellectual property and copyright industry (the other alternative of creative industries) also arise concurrently. Therefore, art brought significant difference on the economy which in turn affected the political stability allover.

The term creative has been used rather than cultural to indicate an effort of cultural policy and the cultural sector to share their ideas with the government, and the presentation of policy in the media and its attachment to information society.

One major concept shared between information society and cultural turn school is the stressed issue on significance of cultural or symbolic production, commonly called knowledge or information according to capitalist economies.

The extensive emphasis contains different analyses within it which focuses on the nature of that developing importance and various economic forms associated with it.

Those different analyses lead to various assessments on significance of cultural sector in the area of media and arts, and nature and function of information work and workers.

The concept of knowledge or information has led to industrial revolution which has brought significant cultural and social changes as justified by the term information society (Garnham 2005:27).

Consequently creative art has had noticeable effects on information society through creating awareness and understanding. This is reflected in the media and visual art which have brought self realization.

According to philosophers, art expresses aesthetic concept because it copies nature hence it describes appearance. The discernment world seems to be unreal; however through appearance some reality is expressed.

However, the world of art is described through the appearance itself. Thus the aesthetic experience is expressed through imaginations and the objects portrayed are the images.

Plato acknowledged poetry and the significant identity depicted in painting. Plato uses such arts to describe beauty. On the other hand, Socrates describes art as beauty, and further claims that it’s an exercise of emotions.

The philosophers argue that the emotionality of art is created through imagination. The imaginative idea is expressed as real through a symbol (Collingwood 2011:163).

The emotional art tends to be formed in the mind and then through symbolism it’s what one observes as the image. Therefore art is significant in creating such images which expresses beauty.

Creative art has caused great impact on imagery through use of symbolism which expresses emotions. Also art expresses beauty from the images formed in the mind they become real through art. Hence art helps one to express beauty and emotions in various forms.

Some few centuries back, art was not regarded as important and was not recognized in the society. In fact, art was not even referred as part of the professionals that existed and there were no experts were associated with this field.

As a result of industrial revolution, there was specialization which led to division of labor. This led to awareness of art and more experts started coming up. Art is an important tool in the society because it communicates societal values.

Artists borrow their ideas from their society therefore artworks portray diversity of values and beliefs in different cultures. As portrayed in the paper, creative industry refers to media and arts which were initially called cultural industries.

This department did not exist earlier since there were no approved policies to support it. Creative industry was disregarded and it required powerful critics to stand firm and fight for its approval.

Nevertheless, there were policies which were later approved and the department became recognized. This brought many changes both socially, culturally and economically.

Belfiore, E. 2006. The unacknowledged legacy Plato, the republic and cultural policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 12, No. 2, 229-244.

Carey, J. 2005. What Good are the arts? London: Faber

Collingwood, R. 2011. Plato’s Philosophy of Art . Retrieved from mind. oxford journals.org. London: metropolitan University

Freeland, C. 2002. But is it Art? An Introduction to Art Theory . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Galloway, S., & Dunlop, S. 2007.A critique of definitions of cultural and creative industries in public policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy , Vol. 13, No. 1. Web.

Garnham, N. 2005.From Cultural to Creative Industries. International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1. Web.

Hook, B. 1996. Angels of art: women and art in American society, 1876-1914. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press.

Howkins, J. 2001. The Creative Economy . London: Penguin

Lewis, R., & Lewis, S. 2008. The Power of Art . New Mexico: Cengage Learning.

Myerscough, J. 1988. The Economic Importance of the Arts in Great Britain . London: Policy Studies Institute

Selwood, S. 2000. The UK Cultural Sector. London: Policy Studies Institute

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9: Art and Power

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• Pamela Sachant, Peggy Blood, Jeffery LeMieux, & Rita Tekippe
• University System of Georgia via GALILEO Open Learning Materials

Learning Objectives

• Describe why and how art and artists have in some cultures been considered to have exceptional power.
• Distinguish between images of persuasion and propaganda, and specify characteristics of each.
• Recognize how and why images are used for such purposes as to display power, influence society, and effect change.
• Indicate ways that images establish and enhance a ruler’s position and authority.
• Identify changes in images of conflict, heroic action, and victims of violent confrontation in various cultures and time periods, including the artist’s intentions as well as the public response.
• Distinguish between and describe the prohibition of images enforced within some religions.
• Describe why protestors or conquerors might destroy images and monuments of a past or defeated culture.
• 9.1: INTRODUCTION
• 9.2: PROPAGANDA, PERSUASION, POLITICS, AND POWER
• 9.3: IMAGERY OF WAR
• 9.4: BEFORE YOU MOVE ON

The Power of Art in Society

The essence of art, art in the society, art and cultural heritage, contemporary problems in arts.

Art can be considered as one of the forms of public consciousness. At the heart of art, lays a creative reflection of reality. Art cognizes and evaluates the world, forms a spiritual shape of people, their feelings and thoughts, their outlook, and awakens their creative abilities. In its essence art is national. The informative role of art makes it close to science, where the artist, as well as the scientist, aspires to make sense of life phenomena, to see in the casual and transient the most typical and characteristic, as well as the pattern in the development of reality.

The deep knowledge of reality, in the long run, is connected with the aspiration to transform it and improve it. The person seizes forces of nature, learns laws of development of society to change the world in compliance with the requirements and the purposes put by the community and the society. Unlike science, art expresses truth, not in abstract notions, but concrete images full of life. The typical in life is embodied in works of art, in unique individually-characteristic forms. In that regard, it can be said that art as an influencing factor plays a major role in society and the life of people.

Accordingly, the art and heritage industry itself had taken different shapes and directions influenced by the consumer nature of the society. In that sense, this paper analyzes art as a power in society, outlining its role and functions, and analyzing the recent issues in art industries.

The aesthetic relationship with reality, contained in all the forms of human activities, could not be ignored as a subject of special reproduction. Such special kind of human activities, in which the aesthetic embodied in the art becomes the content, the method, and the goal is art. In that regard, as an evaluation of the aesthetic effect, art is a process of value finding, rather than a product. (Dague-Barr, 2009)

Tracing the development of theories regarding what represents a work of art, linking art to aesthetics, it can be said that being a work of art is not a physical characteristic, but rather a perception, a perception that previously was considered to be of people belonging to the art world. (Carey, 2006)

In that regard, it can be said that art as a phenomenon is a notion intrinsic to modern society. Art, being born in primeval society, acquired its main characteristics in antiquity, and at the same time, it was not cognized as a special kind of activity. For a certain period, certain activities were considered as arts such as the skills to build houses, navigation skills, good governance, poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, etc. The process of isolating the aesthetic activity, i.e. art in its current perception, began in particular handicrafts, and after that, it was transferred into the sphere of spiritual activity.

Works of art are after-images or replicas of empirical life, since they proffer to the latter what in the outside world is being denied them. In the process, they slough off a repressive, external empirical mode of experiencing the world. Whereas the line separating art from real life should not be fudged, least of all by glorifying the artist, it must be kept in mind that works of art are alive, have a life sui generis. (Adorno et al., 2004)

Art of each epoch is inseparably linked with national culture and historical conditions, with class struggle, and with the level of the spiritual life of the society. Living in a class society, the artist, naturally, acts as the representative of a certain social class. The reflection of the real world, the selection of those or other phenomena of the reality for art reproduction is defined by its social views and is made according to the point of view of certain class ideals and aspirations. In class society, the influence of reactionary ideas leaves traces of limitedness on the creativity of artists.

The artists’ expressions of original interests of classes were seen as expanding artists’ creative outlook and the ability for an aesthetic embodiment in images of art of the advanced aspirations of society as a whole. The art history represents a complex, inconsistent picture of the development of various schools, movements, styles, and currents which are in interaction and struggle.

In their creativity, artists proceed not only from direct impressions, supervision, and observation, but also from the experience which has been accumulated by art through all the history of mankind, from traditions of national movements, leaning on them, and opposing them with the new understanding of the real phenomena.

The progress of art is more strongly and more brightly shown in humanistic and realistic tendencies, along with the gains of each epoch. Realism is an artistic method that is the most corresponding to the informative nature of art. However, the truthful reflection of reality cannot be minimized to copying reality. Realism characterizes aspiration to embody into brightly individual images the typical and the natural in life. The absence of harmonious unity of generalization and the artistic image individualization results in either the sketchiness, which deprives the work of art of persuasiveness, or the depiction of the casual, and small aspects of the reality.

Realism is the art that can be considered as a historical notion. It obtains various contents and forms depending on certain historical conditions of the given epoch, passing several qualitatively unique steps of its development. These steps are defined by changes of the represented subject – new social relations, a new way of life, as well as an embodiment of a new level of social consciousness with the distinction of life representation’s nature.

At early steps of social development, a truthful reflection of an art life is formed spontaneously and mostly dressed in fantastic mythological forms (art of the ancient world and the Middle Ages). Conscious tendency to the cognition of the world, its laws, and realism’s composition as the certain method in art, can be related to the Renaissance epoch when art, as well as science, being released from the captivity of the church’s scholasticism, seizes a truthful display of people’s image, their world outlook, and social relations.

In that regard, it can be considered that the art’s purpose is to reveal in the phenomena of the surrounding life their original essence, visually showing in impressive imagery the most important for the person and a society. One of the main artistic touches can be considered the generalization of an image, it’s standardizing. It allows showing brightly the beautiful in life and uncovers the ugly and the evil. Criticizing the ugly aspects of life, art urges to hate them passionately and to struggle against them. Embodying an ideal of beauty, art inspires deeds for the struggle for the sake of the bright, humane, and good. A major moment of an aesthetic evaluation of the reality is the negative and hostile relation of the artist to all reactionary as ugly, and the evaluation of all progressive as fine.

Art and culture always went to the forefront of society. They laid new paths in social consciousness, created new values, and opened new horizons. When the culture carries out its innovative and educational mission, it becomes a heritage, an experience, and historical memory of the people, and another brick in the building of national identity. In that regard, as art and culture have leading roles in society, they also became a major concern, in terms of their preservation, which can be traced back to France in 1794, where an idea of destroying all Latin inscriptions on monuments came out.

Henry Gregoire, a member of the revolutionary government responded by urging,

a focus on the creator of the art rather than on the patron, to bring the individual to the forefront and to present works of art as examples of the free spirit-genius and talent realized – triumphant over political repression, error and superstition… Because the Pyramids of Egypt had been built by tyranny and for tyranny, ought these monuments of antiquity to be demolished? (Hoffman, 2006)

At earlier times it can be said that art was financed by amateurs. Both rich patrons of art, and the respectable public paid for what was pleasant to them. As a rule, people of creative professions were not rich, if they were not born rich. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the situation began to change, and to a considerable degree, this was related to the accumulation of capital as a result of the industrial revolution, the spreading of education, the development of science, etc.

One after another, museums, theatres and concert halls were opened, which were created and supported by the government or patrons of art, whose numbers have grown, along with the occurrence of an army of professional critics. In the 20th century there were already much more writers, artists, and actors, who could be quite good, and at times very provide themselves. Society began to consider them with more respect, and it could be said that parents were no longer concerned about the fate of the children who decided to be artists.

However, the capitalist model, which purpose was focused on profit and its augmentation, began to change the relation to art gradually. Amateur patrons of art began to be superseded by businessmen and money was invested in what could bring profit. The decisive factor was not the talent of the artist, not the artistic taste of the patron or the public, but the promotion of what was invested in, to receive fast profits. Art and culture became the victims of the process of industrialization which by the end of the 20th century has grasped such spheres which cannot and should not serve profit earning.

Results could be predicted, where the prices increased, the quality was lowered, and the access was limited. Thus, it was the turn of the art to be affected. Today money is invested in arts as in real estate or stock. Especially subjected to market pressure was the fine arts sector, as it is easier to involve market mechanisms when selling. Art became consumer goods and thus should comply with the general mechanism of consumer society actions.

The term art industry might not have become familiar yet, but the techniques of organizational management were spread to it. For is money spent on today? For very rich people it is a diversification of assets portfolio. Those who are of modest means pay for visiting exhibitions, and the ambitious try to be a part of prestigious gatherings.

The occurrence of investors and venture capitalists led to the cultivation of two types of consumers, the elite and the mass consumer. For the latter, who did not go through informational treatment and because of that could not appreciate a certain promoted product, other consumer goods are created which are not demanding intellectual preparation, as elite art, rather than factor related to the psychology of the crowd and appealing not as much to emotions, as to instincts.

An example of such contemporary issues in arts can be seen in the article “Sold!” by Carl Swanson. Published in the October issue of New York Magazine in 2007, the article discussed the sensational resignation of Lisa Dennison from the position of the director of Guggenheim. In her new position, she was engaged in the business development of the auction Sotheby’s. Dennison now helps to replenish the collection of those who have accumulated large sums of money, mostly in Asia and Russia.

Dennison’s new boss Tobias Meyer compares the interests of today’s nouveau riche to the art “icons” of the 20th century, gathered in America, to the robber barons’ fascination with European paintings, and as he stated, “As the Americans were buying Gainsborough’s in 1910, the New Economy is buying portions of bacon and Rothko’s in 2010,”(Swanson, 2007)

Dennison revealed the reason for leaving, stating that museums have ceased to be competitive in the conditions of today’s market, which made her work too difficult, especially after the new CEO of the museum changed its mission, emphasizing the creation and the globalization of the brand of Guggenheim, as an analogy to such brands as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. It can be seen that Dennison attempted to convince her and others that her work in Sotheby’s differs little from her former job. It can be understood though, that if the former job served higher goals and helped to keep self-respect, in the new role she is deprived of it.

Today at auctions the auctions people applaud not for the artist, but for the buyer who spent a fantastic sum. On the crest of the speculation, the prices are raised for the works of known artists. In such a way, Klimt’s portrait was sold about three years ago for a record sum of $135 million, which in no small measure was related to the international scandal connected with its return by the Austrian government to its owners heiress. (VOGEL, 2006)

In that regard, the recent concerns of art and heritage can be seen to be associated mainly with the legal aspects of art preservation. According to such protection, it can be seen that art is protected as it is related to the national and cultural identity of a particular nation. Thus, art can be considered as a reflection of the cultural heritage and preserving works of arts, nations are preserving their cultural heritage. Through works of art, it can be seen what made a particular epoch the way it was, where the history can be written according to the artistic works of different historical periods.

It can be concluded that art is an inseparable sector of the world’s culture which was and still influencing the course of social consciousness. In that regard, it should be outlined that art is also influenced by the changes in social and economic models, turning art into an industry. It should be mentioned that this industry is a profitable one, but the question that should be asked, whether the power of art can sufficiently resist the economic influence of the market, remaining neutral and free of bias. Whether the cultural value of the works of art remains free of such marketing terms as “promotion” and “hype”. The answer to such a question is not easy, but it can be predicted that it depends totally on the people. As stated earlier in the paper, specific work can be considered a work of art if it was perceived that way by people with expertise in art, while the more modern definition states that “a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art.” (Carey, 2006) Thus, it can be said that the answer to the aforementioned questions can lie in the characteristics of the majority that fall into the category of “anyone” in the last definition of a work of art.

ADORNO, T. W., ADORNO, G., TIEDEMANN, R. & HULLOT-KENTOR, R. (2004) Aesthetic theory, London ; New York, Continuum.

CAREY, J. (2006) What good are the arts?, Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press.

DAGUE-BARR, D. (2009) The Power of Art In Society. Modesto Junior College. Web.

HOFFMAN, B. T. (2006) Art and cultural heritage : law, policy, and practice, Cambridge ; New York, Cambridge University Press.

HOPKINS, D. (2000) After modern art : 1945-2000, Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press.

SWANSON, C. (2007) Sold! , New York Magazine. Web.

VOGEL, C. (2006) Lauder Pays $135 Million, a Record, for a Klimt Portrait. New York Times. Web.

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Today's Paper | April 20, 2024

Essay: art’s relationship with power.

Can art be separated from issues of power? How does creative expression in today’s world differ from the eras that have come before? What is the role of the artist in an age of neo-liberal economic order and a global rise in fascism and the crushing of dissent? Eos presents a thought-provoking keynote speech by Harris Khalique, delivered at the closing ceremony of the 11th Karachi Literature Festival 2020

It is indeed a matter of profound privilege and great pleasure to deliver this speech at the closing ceremony of the 11th Karachi Literature Festival. Particularly, because this city by the sea is my birthplace and although I have not been living here for long, “to my soul/ the streets anywhere are the streets of Karachi”.

Let me begin my submissions on art and its relationship with power: what our previous generations have undergone in the past and what our present generations experience in contemporary times. I speak on behalf of those creative writers and artists who are committed to the values of inclusion and pluralism, and believe in fundamental freedoms of speech and artistic expression. I have little concern here for collaborators of power among the ambitious rhymesters, calendar artists, cultural entrepreneurs and propaganda filmmakers.

In the 19th century, and a little before, our ancestors saw the fall of the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent and the decimation of their succeeding regional domains, from Bengal to Awadh and from the Deccan to Punjab, at the hands of the British. They witnessed the lost War of Independence and the absolute ascendancy of colonial rule. Then, in the first half of the 20th century, their later generations felt the tremors coming their way from Europe, caused by the birth of totalitarianism, ironically from the womb of electoral democracy, and the two great wars.

The spectres of those two ages come together to haunt us today — the spectres of imperial subjugation and popular fascism. Our age, however, is comparable yet distinct from those ages. During the 19th century in the Indian subcontinent, the contours of a different era being born were visible to the wise. In case of Europe and North America, after surviving totalitarianism and wars, there were thinkers and planners who could go back to the drawing board. But today, we witness a world falling apart without any signs of how the future will unfold. Even the best among us grope in the darkness of the present.

In his recent work Age of Anger (2017), Indian author Pankaj Mishra presents how the long-held beliefs about the impending success of the institutions of the nation state and liberal democracy are being so vociferously contested. Besides, the very concepts of inclusion and secularism are challenged, largely as a consequence of the disregard for these ideals by their own champion societies and global institutions.

We see the rise of Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India. When it comes to international institutions, we live under an undemocratic UN — owing to the arrangement of its Security Council — and the G-7, being an elite nations’ expedient club that overshadows the global economy.

There is no standard path of history available anymore within a normative framework that would describe the future for nations such as ours, who lag behind in political evolution, social development, scientific achievement and technological advancement. On the one hand, it seems that the human collective has lost track but on the other hand, however, this moment in history may also be taken as an opportunity to stop denying diverse peoples their contexts in the name of universality.

This can mark a new beginning for according due recognition to contextualised discourses without overlooking universal human connections. That will bring enormous responsibility of charting new paths on our indigenous thinking led by contemporary academics, scholars, historians and social scientists. However, this onus has to be equally shared by our artists, because it is only art that subverts power most decisively.

In Pakistan, since ever, shabby treatment was meted out to nonconforming artists who enriched our writing and fine arts by transcending intellectual and social barriers. Ones who subscribed to the principles of democratic rule or believed in the ideal of a classless society — whether writers or political workers — faced all kinds of repression. They had to make a choice every single moment — between silence and speech, caution and courage, calm and rage, amnesia and memory.

Although I have no personal recollection of the first two successive military dictatorships, I do have vivid memories of the last two. The ill-fated and short-lived civilian interludes between martial rules did much less than needed to remove restrictions on intellectual freedom and eliminate causes for fear among those who act, paint, sing or write. In fact, some civilian leaders matched the intolerance and vindictiveness of the martial rulers.

There is one significant difference between those who lived in the past and we, who survive in the present. Our predecessors in Pakistan faced a visible opponent — the oppression by the state carried out through its coercive arms, which were defined and manifest. Now, we face multiple opponents, besides the coercive arms of the state. They are insidious yet omnipresent. They are discernible but not entirely explainable. Because the key challenge of our times is a society which is both radicalised and fragmented.

Unlike in fascist Germany between 1933 and 1945, there is no unifying force that is able to coalesce these stark sentiments. There is a polycentric horizontal spread of the agency of violence. So there are storm troopers of various hues and colours adhering to different power centres. A society composed of people prone to bigotry and xenophobia characterises a simple linearity leading to popular fascism. It has a desire to eliminate those who shake up this linearity.

Since art and creativity pose a grave threat to linearity by their reliance on discursive categories and disruptive imagination, they make things complex for a simplistic mind. Therefore, art is censured and confined, if it cannot be completely eliminated. In his Lectures on Russian Literature (1980), Vladimir Nabokov comments on how one of the greatest Russian poets, Alexander Pushkin, would cause irritation to the Russian officialdom, particularly the Tsar himself. Here I quote from Nabokov where he mentions power’s view of Pushkin’s poetry:

“… instead of being a good servant of the state in the rank and file of the administration and extolling conventional virtues in his vocational writings (if write he must), [Pushkin] composed extremely arrogant and extremely independent and extremely wicked verse in which a dangerous freedom of thought was evident in the novelty of his versification, in the audacity of his sensual fancy, and in his propensity for making fun of major and minor tyrants.”

The relationship between art and power in every society has always remained tricky. It becomes worse when art is confronted with imperial subjugation or popular fascism. Since in our times we face both, there is a constant tension at play, a hide-and-seek, a tussle between subservience and subversion. Many, if not most, of the poets and writers anywhere are distressed because the experience of living in many places across continents is increasingly more troubling.

But poets, writers and artists in deeply troubled societies like Pakistan are deeply troubled. There is an internal urge that makes us revolve around the axis of literature and an external pull that makes us rotate with the sphere of politics. The choice is not only to be made between silence and speech, caution and courage, calm and rage, and amnesia and memory. There is also an artistic choice that also needs to be made between rhapsody or gloom and indifference or compassion. It is a process of creating a space fringed by two options. There is a continuous negotiation that takes place between aesthetic sense and social consciousness. For a poem has to be a poem first and last, without compromising its artistic value.

I understand that the pressure on artists for making these choices battles with the social class of some, but challenges the inherent artistic preferences of all. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, we are hedonists trapped in an intensely political world. But since we are trapped, our expression has to reflect and resonate with the zeitgeist — the spirit of the age. Our writing and creative expression must contest the interests of the neo-liberal economic order only serving the elites and the affluent, and the coercive institutions of the state crushing or silencing dissent.

The dominant classes and institutions have little stake in listening to multiple voices due to their heightened sense of superiority. They seek managerial quick fixes to deep-seated social problems. This mindset leads to behaviours and actions that cause the weakening of participatory democracy and shrinking of the space for the free mind. Consequently, extremism and violence grow and expand. Once violence prevails, not only free political discourse is subdued, but critical cultural dialogue is muffled.

The conversation between art and power is a tedious conversation — frustrating for art and cumbersome for power. It is impossible for art to escape this conversation because there is a certain sensibility that gets developed among the best of its practitioners, who also refuse to leave their countries until forced. The few that immediately come to my mind from a rather long list are Nazim Hikmet from Turkey, Pablo Neruda from Chile, Anna Akhmatova from Russia and Mir Gul Khan Naseer from Pakistan.

Sometimes power is direct, brutal, non-negotiating and uncompromising. In the late 17th and early 18th-century Delhi, when authority sought submission and poetry refused, the verse of absurdist Urdu poet Jafar Zatalli, cost him his life. Three centuries later, the designs of exercising brute force are reconfigured. Now purges take place and dissidents disappear. A critical intelligence report, a random petition filed in the court of law, an edict from a religious cleric or the dissection of one’s character by a TV talk-show host is enough to cause deep personal harm and severe public humiliation.

The ways of crude oppression are sometimes replaced by or stay in tandem with the ways of coercive co-option. For instance, in the case of Pakistan, it was during Gen Pervez Musharraf’s martial rule when an illusion of artistic and intellectual freedom was created for a coterie of self-satisfied liberals in metropolitan centres of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, that remain far away from Balochistan, parts of Sindh, Gilgit-Baltistan and the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas, now merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The primary narrative, hinging upon the supremacy of institutions inherited from colonial times as well as the dominance of a certain state policy focusing only on national security through kinetic means, unfortunately, remains intact.

In today’s Pakistan, we experience quasi-democracy. Whether or not we find tangible evidence for the so-called hybrid war being waged through cyberspace, we have evidence — firm and sufficient — that we live under a hybrid political dispensation. We see a rise in poverty and destitution, inequality and dispossession. Sometimes it seems that Marie Antoinette has become our queen who tells us to eat cake if we can’t afford bread. This is an age of chilling fear, with incarceration or disappearance of those criticising state policies and colonial sedition laws being used against non-violent political opponents.

These are the consequences of the resurgence of imperial subjugation and popular fascism. Books are being confiscated, films are being banned, poetry is being censored and the press is being gagged. The same is the case in some other parts of the world, and the worst is in Modi’s India. Kashmiris are brutally suppressed and Muslims across India face a pogrom.

Art anywhere confronts such nakedness of power and the artist never submits. A major fiction writer of our times, Julian Barnes writes in Flaubert’s Parrot: “the greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously.” This is how real art views patriotism. Art also understands the old German saying: “The king makes war and people die.” In any such conflict perpetuated by power, the side that art picks is the side of life, truth, dignity and compassion.

The contemporary human condition brings a lot of grief to a creative individual. Yet that feeling of grief is overcome by an inherent sense of pride. That pride comes from the ability of a poet or a painter, musician or a fiction writer, to challenge and ridicule the powers that be — ranging from Western hegemony to Eastern orthodoxy and all that falls in between — through the sheer subversive force of art.

Ghalib says:

For the free, grief does not last beyond a moment Our lightning illuminates the dark room of sorrow

The writer is a poet, essayist and the Secretary-General of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 15th, 2020

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Jan / Feb 2017 Issue

• Letter from the Editor

On the Power of Art and Challenging Cultural Inequity

Courtesy of the author’s Facebook page .

A rt is a my path to freedom, emancipation and equity. While many people proclaim to understand the power of art, I think few understand the role of art in challenging structures of systemic injustice—the power of art in transforming the imagination, and in building true, lasting social change. Art and its mom, Culture, surround us all the time. They inform that way we connect to each other, the way we identify, the values we form as societies. The art and culture that consistently envelops us —from the visual imagery in the streets and in galleries, to the stories we see enacted in movies, to the books we read to our children—is informed by the same systemic inequities and ideas that we experience and witness in our day-to-day lives. Art has the ability to solidify dominant ideologies, or to transform them entirely.

Art IS power. Culture is power, and the current arts ecosystem mirrors the rampant economic and racial inequity we see in our schools and communities. From art school faculty, to art critics, to museum boards, to gallery owners, to art award jurors—the art world is #hellawhite. And so by extension, there is necessarily a bias and a perspective embedded in the very work that emerges from this ecosystem, and it continues and will continue to exclude, invisibilize, and otherize.

And because art and culture shape the way we think, the output of our current arts ecosystem is contributing to the very culture ideas most of wish to discard: the culture of rape, the culture of white supremacy, the culture that believes in the punishment and incarceration of the perceived “other.” Consider the way Reagan created a cultural narrative that systematized and codified a practice of locking up millions of Black and Latino men over minor drug offenses. Think about the “War on Drugs” commercials, the D.A.R.E. program in schools, the TV shows in the 80s that criminalized people of color (not to mention the way that television and movies continue to typecast people of color when they bother to cast them at all ).

On a more empowering note, consider how cultural works such as the daytime television show Ellen , the play The Laramie Project , and Act Up’s “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” campaign helped shape a twenty year period where being queer and deserving of full human rights became normal, eventually leading to marriage equality in the Supreme Court. Those who tell the most powerful stories, those who create and share truth-filled emotional, bold content will win. Because, as this election made clear, people are more moved by their emotions than they are by facts.

Art and culture have always shaped policy. Why else would Reagan have gutted the National Endowment for the Arts during his tenure? Why have all of history’s most repressive governments gone after the arts aggressively? In order to genuinely tap into the power of art as a catalyst for social change, we must not only consider the WHAT of the artistic object, but also HOW it came to be and WHO was involved in its creation, as well as WHOSE perspective it reflects. This is how we will recognize, challenge and ultimately dismantle the white supremacy that still dominates our world and the art ecosystem as we know it. Because when we are able to include the stories, the experiences, and the perspectives of people of color, women, immigrants, and queer folks, our world becomes more inclusive, more open, and more loving. We will hear stories that humanize, that complicate ingrained biases, and that ultimately inspire you to advocate for the humanity of a person who might be very different from you.

When I create work and engage in creative projects—whether it’s working with migrant folks in detention centers or consulting about a national arts strategy—I think deeply about cultural equity: the idea that people of color, women and queer folk must have access to representation, power, and visibility in the massive powerful goddess that is Art. Not only are inclusionary and complex narratives, beliefs and images needed in order to challenge outdated ideologies and to shift culture in favor of those at the margins, but we also must build systems that allow these voices to enter in the first place. For this to happen, we must radically reimagine the institutions that have held power in the arts for so long. And yes, we will need a lot white folks to let go of their power, in order for it to be distributed equally among all of us, especially in the arts. Art is supposed to be a language of freedom, of universality, and of inclusion. Access to and participation in arts and culture are both human rights, and for too long, only a few perspectives have sat at the table, century after century.

I feel that we are in a moment here, where we must use the same critical analysis employed when talking about police brutality against Black people, the same critical analysis with which we talk about mass incarceration and rape culture. It’s time that we understand that a grossly unequal arts world is only perpetuating ideologies that contribute to our disempowerment.

Enough. I believe it’s time to stand up to the white supremacy that is rampant in the art world. The political times require us to be bold, unapologetic, and truthful about cultural power.

Art for me has always been a way for me to find my own voice. It is how I have made sense of the world and told my story on my own terms. When I was first aware of how people saw me, art became a strategy for me to escape and challenge the institutions of sexism and racism that surrounded me. Through art, I found the power to tell stories about people like me, to humanize people who are relegated to the margins, to complicate and challenge the old and tired tropes we see about people of color over and over again in mainstream media.

This “Momentum” issue will attempt to tell those stories—of artists who haven’t been fully represented as the whole, complicated people they are, of the diverse set of infrastructures created to benefit one group to the detriment of another, and of the people working to create a world that is governed by the power of ideas, not the bank account or political connections of the people behind them.

How do we challenge cultural inequity? How do we develop practices that are more inclusionary? How do we expand the way we think, assess, and value art so that we also consider questions of cultural equity? How do we change this ecosystem that is not catching up to the demands of our time? By creating and celebrating art and culture that humanizes, complicates, and connects.

Favianna Rodriguez

• "War on Drugs"
• call to action
• cultural inequity
• National Endowment for the Arts
• pop culture
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• white supremacy

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Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art.  It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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British Council

How can the arts contribute to shaping a nation’s soft power? Joseph Nye outlined that one of the three key parts to a nation’s soft power is ‘its culture’: how it presents itself and is attractive to other countries and citizens. This can include its heritage and the story told through its history, as well as newer and fluid elements of culture such as media, digital assets and film. 

This thought piece examines both scholarly and practice-derived literature on arts, culture and soft power. Considering international examples including China, Colombia, Germany and Russia, the paper explores how culture can illuminate, disrupt and diversify the soft power of a country, and what the role of different institutions and citizens themselves may be in the new soft power age.

Professor Gayle McPherson and Professor David McGillivray, with Dr Sophie Mamattah, Tamsin Cox, and Karl-Erik Normann, University of the West of Scotland

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ART AND POWER

Guest essay by richard reitzell.

Art and power- two words that don’t seem to naturally fit together. Power conveys a sense of influence, drama, action, and suggests a variety of intense images – the roar of rocket, waves crashing against a rocky shoreline, lightning piercing a night sky, or even the smooth muscular strides of horse racing’s recent Triple Crown champion Justified charging down the home stretch.

In contrast, for many of us, art conjures images of contemplation in a quiet museum, a flurried paint pattern of a contemporary work, or beautiful landscapes dappled with soft pastel tones that comfortably immerse us into a relaxing place or moment. And yet, throughout the annals of time and history two threads are continually evident- the power and impact of the written word and the visual image. Painting and art through the centuries have shown the persistent power to impact and influence human emotions and perceptions and to directly impact or influence a range of endeavors and events.

Let’s take a closer look…

The Power of the Cross

For many centuries in Europe the creation of art and the output of artists was almost exclusively for the benefit of the churches that dominated the daily life. In fact, most early Italian art was created exclusively around religious themes that served many purposes. Churches utilized art in magnificent altarpieces, large canvases that conveyed allegorical lessons and parables from the bible, and even used the stunning beauty of stained glass to create cathedrals that enthralled and welcomed their followers with a sense of something special. In the cathedrals and churches that were often the core of European communities, it was art that helped create a warm welcoming presence and established the visual connection between religion and its teachings. Art positioned biblical figures as real flesh and blood characters and not merely distant writings. Art contributed significantly to the magnificent splendor and all encompassing aura of the church and reinforced the power and belief in a higher power.

The Power of the Crown

The other powerful influence in the development of the western world was the presence of royalty in many countries. For generations after generations, rulers and royalty would adorn their palaces and country homes with extensive art collections gathered through commissions, conquests, or acquisitions. By commissioning major artworks that captured scenes of their kingdom and stories from the bible and mythology, they conveyed themselves in a manner that radiated a sense of importance, power, burnished their legacies, and further extended their influence. These vast collections, including the massive collection of Napoleon, became the foundation of the Louvre, the world’s largest and most famous museum. The often immense, neo-classical paintings exuded power as they commemorated coronations and other royal events, celebrated great battlefield victories, captured the drama of foreign travels, documented meetings with dignitaries, and generally portrayed the monarchs and their families with near-mythological relevance. Perhaps no stronger example of the power of art to embellish an image is the twenty-four immense Medici Cycle murals that fill a large gallery at the Louvre. Marie de’ Medici was a relatively minor player in French history whose royal connection was brief and mostly undistinguished. After returning from exile and building the Luxembourg Palace, she commissioned the noted artist Peter Paul Rubens to create twenty-four murals that glorified her life. While Rubens had few life accomplishments of Marie to work with, he created a powerful series of magnificently allegorical paintings that elevated Medici from a historical footnote to an almost mythical level.

The Power of Patriotism

While different from the deep connection of personal religious beliefs or the experience of a monarch, patriotism is an often unifying glue that bonds people of varied backgrounds under a common ideal. Paintings may powerfully convey a national theme or become a living emblem of a patriotic feeling. It is hard to look at the oversized canvas of Washington Crossing the Delaware that so dramatically hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and not gain a sense of George Washington as a bold and courageous leader who shares the founding aspirations of the American promise. A similar feeling is evoked by Archibald Willard’s Spirit of ’76 (also known as Yankee Doodle) capturing a trio of battlefield participants playing drums and fife with a smoke-obscured flag standing tall on a battlefield of the revolution. The painting of Rosie the Riveter that now hangs at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas captures a different sense of patriotism. Portraying the wartime contributions of the everyday woman, the series of paintings communicated a powerful message of inclusion and triumph to a national audience. Another powerful image that commemorated a patriotic theme was the famous painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix. An inspiring work that shows Liberty leading the uprising against the French King Charles X, the painting created both the enduring image of a citizen-led uprising, but also established the image of Liberty as a powerful female.

The Power of Illumination

Whether one considers illumination in the literal sense of the glowing light, as a fascinating and alluring imagery, or a deeper reflection of opening of one’s mind to newer ideas and possibilities, there are a myriad of wonderful examples of how art provided the power of light. The beauty of illumination in William Mallard Turner’s works can only inspire those who spend a moment with his greatest masterpieces. Whether a scene from the Mediterranean, or a setting of mythological nature, Turner’s radiant sun and iridescent sky provides a wonderfully luminescent power that few can resist. In Nineteenth Century America artists like Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Fredrick Church and others created a similar sense of marvel as they captured the sense of wonderment that we felt for America’s western frontier. Symbolic of our growth as a nation and of the limitless possibilities of discovery in the uncharted magnificence of the emerging American West, the artists created powerful imagery that inspired and metaphorically added to our emerging sense of America’s greatness and limitless future.

The Power of Imagery on the Senses

This power of art may be the most obvious of all. It is fascinating to realize how stimulating and powerful layers of paint on a flat surface by the skilled hand of an artist can be. One only needs to look at later works from southern France by Vincent Van Gogh. These paintings of quiet landscapes become wildly energetic through his use of thick, bright, vibrating strokes ofpaint that convincingly express his inner turmoil and agitated state. Several series of abstract paintings from Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky convey bright colors and stimulating patterns and yet also convey visual expressions of music that merge multiple senses. American artist Edward Hopper was a master of creating quiet, serene paintings that evoked a deep sense of solitude and isolation in the viewer. A swirling storm on a dark day captured on canvas by Frenchman Maurice Vlaminck instantly alters the viewer in ways that are difficult to describe. And finally, no one through the years altered the viewer’s senses more than Pablo Picasso. Beginning in his “Blue” period, through his cubist days, continuing with his wild, distorted representations of the human form, Picasso constantly and creatively challenged our senses and our views of what is normal art and form.

The Power of Beguilement and Curiosity

Beguilement and curiosity are fascinating emotions that stimulate thought in so many ways. Who can look at Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa without a sense of beguilement? The calm setting, the mesmerizing “smile”, the odd background for a portrait. The sense of engagement created in the viewer all speak to the power of art. Similar emotions are triggered when one is exposed to surrealistic art of Salvador Dali or René Magritte who created a genre that co-mingled reality and sub-conscious imagery with a strong dose of imagination. Other examples abound; the power and later desperation of German expressionism in the early twentieth century, the horror of Jewish art during World War II, the simplicity of form seen in the later art of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, the power of altering shapes and form in the art of Paul Cezanne, the kinetic motion and rhythm of the Italian Futurists, the powerfully saturated colors of the Fauvists, and even the wild flurry of form and emotion seen in the works of Willem de Kooning’s chaotic images of the female soul

Art and Power … words that absolutely belong together!

RICHARD REITZELL is an avid art collector and author of From a Versatile Brush the Life and Art of Jean Mannheim. He is a member of the CMATO Board of Directors.

Women, art, and power

And other essays, by linda nochlin.

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Women, Art, and Power--seven landmark essays on women artists and women in art history--brings together the work of almost twenty years of scholarship and speculation.

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Sensitive to Art & its Discontents

How Art Can Operate as Soft Power

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Antoni Tàpies “Pintura amb manilles” (Painting with Handcuffs) (​1970) (© Comissió Tàpies, Vegap; photograph: © Gasull Fotografia, 2018)

BARCELONA, Spain — Art and soft power have always been uneasy bedfellows, and the latest situation in Catalonia is perhaps the most flagrant example. There, seven Catalan Members of Parliament (MPs), and the leaders of the grassroots organizations Òmnium Cultural and the Catalan National Assembly (Assemblea Nacional Catalana or ANC) , are currently on trial before the Supreme Court in Madrid, accused of sedition and rebellion, while Catalonia’s former president, Carles Puigdemont, has fled to Brussels seeking political protection .

On a recent two-month sojourn to Barcelona, I spent considerable time taking in two exhibitions — one featuring the work of Antoni Tàpies , ( Antoni Tàpies: Political Biography ) the other, the first European, solo show of artist Erkan Özgen ( Giving Voices: Erkan Özgen )— both of which came to represent for me a renewed focus on the role of art as a sister to soft power today. When seen together, the two exhibitions reveal how art — at its best — can tackle issues of social justice and political autonomy, but not acting as propaganda.

During the Cold War, soft power was a means by which the two majorly influential ideologies of socio-economic organization — capitalism and communism — battled using culture, economics and education. Soft power remains today, as it has for decades, a means by which state (and some non-state) actors can wield considerable influence, persuading the adoption of certain policies without overt military force. It is a nonlinear strategy, attempting to win hearts and minds.

Antoni Tàpies, “​Relleu negre per a Documenta” ​(Black Relief for Documenta) (1964) (© Comissió Tàpies / Vegap, 2018)

Born in 1923 to the son of a lawyer and Catalan nationalist, Antoni Tàpies was exposed at an early age to the cultural and social influence of leaders in the Catalan public sphere. As a region with its own culture and language, tensions between Spain and Catalonia go back centuries. During the Franco era, after the Spanish Civil War, Tàpies co-founded Dau al Set , one of the first post-war art movements outside of France with connections to Surrealism and Dada, during which Tàpies never wavered from his commitment to social justice.

By the 1970s, when Franco’s one-party, authoritarian dictatorship was solidified, Tàpies’s work started to reference symbols of Catalan identity, which was anathema to Franco. During this period, Tàpies began work on a series of lithographs called Assassins, which consists of an homage to Salvador Puig Antich , whose immensely unpopular execution in 1974 under Franco made him a cause célèbre for Catalan autonomists.

In Tàpies’s political works, like the Assassins, symbolism and allegory are used almost interchangeably. A painting from the period, titled “November 7, 1971” (1971), commemorates the establishment of the Catalan National Assembly after a coalition of various anti-Francoist groups gathered in a Barcelona church. There, they collectively called for freedom, amnesty for political prisoners, and the adoption of a statute of autonomy. On that very day, Tàpies painted a large rectangular canvas emblazoned with only the date, underneath a swath of red paint. The painting commemorates this momentous occasion, the date being the focal point of the work.

Standing in front of the work today, it still resonates with a remarkable sense of commitment, and political awareness. The hastiness of it, the number seven painted in black, above a scribbled writing of “Novembre”, underneath a hue of Catalan yellow, still rings with a sense of urgency. The red paint above perhaps an ode to the thousands of political prisoners who died or went missing under Franco.

Antoni Tàpies. “7 de novembre”​ (November 7) ( 1971) Parliament of Catalonia collection, Barcelona (© Comissió Tàpies / Vegap; photograph: © Gasull Fotografia, 2018)

Years before it had been defined by Nye, Tàpies appeared to be keenly aware of the ability of soft power to win hearts and minds. His main strategy was to use symbols to comment on social events that appear on the surface to be innocent, but in reality are deeply political. His unique body of work, made under a Franco regime marked by decades of censorship and repression, still appears to me a fresh aesthetic provocation, albeit now recontextualized in the complex struggles for Catalan independence currently being waged today.

Today, according to Sebastian Balfour , professor of contemporary Spanish studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, soft power is being used by Madrid in an effort to curtail the push for Catalan independence . He says that the Spanish government is using culture as a means of ensuring the continuance of a unified Spanish state, one that includes the economic powerhouse of greater Catalonia. The current Spanish government, he says, is “deploying soft power, conscious no doubt that any use of coercion would strengthen popular support for independence in Catalonia.”

Echoing this judgment, Laura Calçada, a Catalan journalist writing for Hyperallergic in 2017, found that institutions in Barcelona (and Catalonia more generally) are exercising considerable self-restraint with respect to programming that directly deals with the issue of Catalan independence. After conducting a series of interviews with representatives of several prominent arts and culture organizations, she concluded: “Money and diplomatic ties are one explanation for the tendency towards institutional reticence around the secession issue.” Calçada further wrote: “The situation is logistically, structurally, politically, and financially complicated because the vast majority of Catalan arts and culture institutions receive funding from both the Catalan and Spanish governments.”

However, the Antoni Tàpies Foundation , located in Barcelona, is relatively more autonomous than several of the public institutions Calçada researched. As a private foundation, they are less susceptible to the whims of regulatory bodies or national arts councils. Carles Guerra, an artist, critic and educator who currently serves as director told me that it receives the bulk of its revenues from the private trust established under Tàpies’s name. This allows them to exercise more autonomy in terms of the programming they platform. Touching on the subject of institutional responsibility, he said that the Tàpies Foundation remains firmly committed to the values of Tàpies himself, who died in 2012.

Nowhere was this commitment to social justice more evident than in a recent exhibition, Political Biography, which tracked Tàpies’s politically and socially engaged works from 1946 through 1977. The exhibition takes as a point of departure a 1977 self-published autobiographical work by Tàpies called Memòria personal. Fragment per a una autobiografia (A Personal Memoir. Fragments for an Autobiography). In it, Tàpies recounts the challenges of life under Franco. He wrote:

I now understood that, all told, the condition as a solitary bird, as an independent rebel that artists need to assume at times painfully, may also lie at the center of the freedom and hope that inspire so many ideas that turn to militancy.

Though the foundation is mainly dedicated to the life and works of Tàpies himself, it also partners with other foundations — such as the Han Nefkens Foundation — to present contemporary artists who are active in socially and politically relevant ways today. A case in point of this is an exhibition of Erkan Özgen currently titled Giving Voices. As his first solo show in Europe, Özgen’s exhibition at the Tàpies Foundation presents an assembly of works, mostly video, that explore themes such as forced displacement, migration, and human rights.

In Özgen’s “Wonderland” (2016), a work that received considerable praise when shown in the last Istanbul Biennial, we encounter a young boy named Mohammed. This boy was filmed by Özgen immediately after losing members of his family to an Islamic State offensive on his home of Kobanî in 2015. The young Mohammed — deaf and mute — uses gestures to recount his forced displacement. Özgen told me that he met the boy by chance, after his brother had taken him in from a nearby refugee camp.

Erkan Özgen, “Wonderland” (2016) video stills, (copyright, the artist)

In Diyarbakır, where Özgen continues to live and work and teach at a local school, Turkish forces have been involved in bitter conflict with the Kurds for decades — a conflict spread across Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Embedded in the region, Özgen’s unique perspective offers a view of the numerous conflicts and systematically repressed groups therein.

Another video work in Özgen’s exhibition, “Purple Muslin ” (2018), follows several Yazidi women who escaped the Islamic State of Irak an al-Sham forces and sought refuge in Northern Iraq. In the video, these women describe their trauma and memories of violence. Alongside the video, a piece of purple fabric is displayed in a vitrine — a keepsake Özgen was given from the women after visiting them in the refugee camp in 2017. The video, which premiered at the last Manifesta in Palermo, goes beyond a journalistic framing by focusing on the lived realities, often deeply personal, of the women and their responses to their strenuous conditions. Like the Kurds, the Yazidis in Iraq are seen as apostates and have been subject to numerous forms of violent suppression. In Özgen’s video, we learn of the discriminatory policy towards the Yazidi minority in one of the world’s most dangerous places, Northern Iraq, where before being subject to incursions from ISIS, they were subject to years of violence under Saddam Hussein, and then during the Iraq War.

Part of Özgen’s strength lies in his ability to slip into these communities with care and trust. According to Hilde Teerlinck, director of the Han Nefkens Foundation, which produced “Purple Muslin” (2018) and the “Aesthetics of Weapons” (2018), both of which appear in the show:

In a time of a turbulent migration crisis that is redefining our political and social ecosystem, Erkan Özgen’s works give voice to a series of stories bound to be forgotten over the constant flow of information, or sometimes intentionally overshadowed. They are fragments that awaken feelings and fundamental questions. How can art contribute to our understanding of the reality of war, conflict and violence?

The subjects and people Özgen often foregrounds, we are reminded, are people with their own stories, hopes, and dreams.

Erkan Özgen, “Purple Muslin” (2018) video stills; produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation (copyright, the artist)

Accordingly, the two exhibitions — seen together — raise important questions for me with respect to how art can respond to urgent social justice issues. While nations like Turkey and Spain have access to soft and hard power alike, in stateless nation building projects — such as in Catalonia and Greater Kurdistan — art can and should challenge the diplomatic efforts of dominant, hegemonic powers, with voices who do not fit the status quo. Despite its obvious limitations, cultural diplomacy (or soft power) can and should be leveraged as a means of peacefully enhancing relations between cultures in diaspora, as mechanisms of cultural and political survival for minorities under threat.

This is not to argue for some pastiche propaganda masquerading as art, nor for bombastic artistic activism, but rather to open up timely conversations on controversial, even dangerous issues.

Cultural diplomacy (aka soft power) can and should be used to develop constructive, oppositional, and nuanced discourses, while remembering that when art is put to work in direct service of politics, tensions will inevitably arise. But in the interest of minorities struggling to survive, soft power can be leveraged to strategic advantage, even and perhaps especially in the face of direct violence and repression.

Erkan Özgen, “Aesthetics of Weapons” (2018) produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation (copyright, the artist)

In the words of Catalan-based critic and curator Àngels Diaz Miralda Tena, the strength of Tàpies is precisely in his ability to use art as a means of gaining political leverage, but without being overly propagandistic:

Tàpies developed a method of writing in an abstract language in which clues and symbols could tell larger stories. This is still happening today. While political art is necessary in raising awareness, sometimes the lack of engagement with a specific subject can be more telling than anything else.

Through their respective engagement with social justice and human rights, both Özgen and Tàpies share a strong tradition and commitment to political art, but not in ways that makes them overtly biased. Their aesthetic kinship is rooted in their sensitivity to vulnerable populations, and their abilities to use art to respond to the socioeconomic concerns of their time. Accordingly, we should remember that political art doesn’t always have be agitational; it can subtle and nuanced, employing visual references to broader themes without the categorical absoluteness that flattens art into a tool of pure propaganda.

Dorian Batycka

Dorian Batycka is an independent curator, art critic, and DJ currently based Berlin. Previously, he was curator of contemporary art at Bait Muzna for Art Film (Muscat, Oman), assistant curator for the... More by Dorian Batycka

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Theory. Utopia. Empathy. Ephemeral arts - EST. 1990 - ATHENS LONDON NEW YORK

Trojan Horses- Activist art and power by Lucy Lippard- a historic essay positively revisited

Positively trojan horses revisited .

“Trojan Horses” appeared at the height of the Reagan years in the U.S., a highly charged political period that saw a heavy backlash against progressive and feminist ideas in the so-called culture wars waged by the Right. Lippard reported from the trenches, not only providing context and arguments, but also offering contemporary examples of activist art and cultural resistance. My interest here lies less in retelling those stories—for that one doesn’t need to look any further than the essay itself—than in focusing on Lippard’s central argument. Yet it should be mentioned that one aspect of the examples is particularly striking now: the sheer number of engaged practices fusing art and activism in a decade most commonly understood in art historical terms as a postmodern, object-based, commodity-oriented and even apolitical decade—and often either derided or commended for those very features. However, as Lippard’s survey and other sources point out, there is also another history, a counter-history. Moreover, the 1980s now appear to have witnessed a much larger movement of artistic activism than, say, the 1990s and its often heralded return to the social and political in art, not to mention our present decade . . .

Lippard’s argument is not merely historical, though, but also offers something resembling ontology, or even “hauntology,” and it does so from the outset, from its very title and its invocation of an example that is not so much historical as it is mythological: the Trojan Horse. Like the Trojan Horse, activist art enters hallowed halls where it does not properly belong by way of a disguise—by being an alluring aesthetic object, it pushes into the institution of art, both concretely and metaphorically. But unlike the Trojan Horse, activist art is not instrumental in the violent overthrow of a regime, but works rather by subverting the very idea of an aesthetic object. Obviously, in (art) activist circles and beyond, the debate continues as to whether this subversion is merely a masquerade—a purely strategic universalism that pretends to be “art” in order to gain access—or whether we are dealing with a Janus-faced identity: at once activist  and  aesthetic. And then there is the possibility of activist art masquerading as a Janus!

Crucial to the idea of the Trojan Horse is the possibility of movement from the outside of a stronghold to the inside by means of artistic production. Indeed, for Lippard, the foremost characteristic of activist art is that it moves between art institutions and local, political communities and contexts—sometimes engaging so significantly in the latter that visibility in the former becomes secondary, irrelevant, even obsolete. Activist art, then, is not a genre, not an ism, but is rather an engagement in social issues and social change through a great variety of methods and mediums. It is pragmatic rather than idiomatic. Therefore, the question of whether or not it is art, and whether artistic production is a useful platform for political change, does not come up. Politics is seen in terms of how one acts in the situation one is in—a question of  how  one engages. Rather than maintaining a dichotomy between art and activism or between aesthetics and politics, another strategic, albeit tentative distinction is established between  political  art and  activist  art, between social concerns and commentary on the one hand, and community involvement and organizing on the other.

These two approaches are united by the concept of power: the power of art and the power of the people. As Lippard duly notes, no one can achieve change alone—not even famous artists. Change can only be realized as part of a movement, hence the focus on community building and consciousness-raising found in much art activism. But artists also have access to power through their framing and reframing of the visible and seemingly invisible, through subversion of rather than subservience to dominant discourses of visibility and representation. Furthermore, according to Lippard, artists have among producers a uniquely high degree of control over their production, if not their post-production and distribution. While there certainly are  employers  in the art world, in its wider context of cultural production, and in the knowledge economy, an initial control over the means of artistic production is taken for granted; and to whatever degree, and, crucially, to whom, this control is then relinquished—be it to institutions, collectors, collaborators, or communities—this comprises a political decision paralleling those that govern the initial production of images themselves. In other words, the struggle today is not only over the production of images and ideas, but also over their dissemination and distribution, a struggle that cannot be endured alone, but always with, as well as against others: embedded  and  expanded.

× introduction written by Simon Sheikh

Simon Sheikh  is a curator and critic. He is currently assistant professor of art theory and coordinator of the Critical Studies program at the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden. He was the director of the Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen from 1999 to 2002 and a curator at NIFCA, Helsinki, from 2003 to 2004. He was editor of the magazine  Øjeblikket  from 1996 to 2000 and a member of the project group GLOBE from 1993 to 2000.

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Lucy lippard:, trojan horses activist art and power pdf.

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Women, art, and power : and other essays

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Islamic Arms and Armor in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Armor and weaponry were central to Islamic culture not only as a means of conquest and the spread of the faith, but also as symbols of status, wealth, and power. The finest arms were made by master craftsmen working with the leading designers, goldsmiths, and jewelers, whose work transformed utilitarian military equipment into courtly works of art. This book reveals the diversity and artistic quality of one of the most important and encyclopedic collections of its kind in the West.

The Metropolitan Museum's holdings span ten centuries and include representative pieces from almost every Islamic culture from Spain to the Caucasus. The collection includes rare early works, among them the oldest documented Islamic sword, and is rich in helmets and body armor, decorated with calligraphy and arabesques, that were worn in Iran and Anatolia in the late fifteenth century. Other masterpieces include a jeweled short sword (yatagan) with a blade of "watered" steel that comes from the court of Süleyman the Magnificent, a seventeenth-century gold-inlaid armor associated with Shah Jahan, and two gold-inlaid flintlock firearms belonging to the guard of Tipu Sultan of Mysore.

Presenting 126 objects, each handsomely photographed and richly documented with a detailed description and discussion of its technical, historical, and artistic importance, this overview of the Met's holdings is supplemented by an introductory essay on the formation of the collection, and appendixes on iconography and on Turkman-style armor.

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Alexander, David G., Stuart W. Pyhrr, and Will Kwiatkowski. 2015. Islamic Arms and Armor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Nancy Pelosi book, ‘The Art of Power,’ will reflect on her career in public life

FILE - Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., talks to The Associated Press on April 19, 2023, at the Capitol in Washington. Pelosi has completed a book about her years in public life, from legislation she helped enact to such traumatizing moments as the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol and the assault at her San Francisco home that left her husband with a fractured skull. Simon & Schuster announced Thursday, April 18, 2024, that Pelosi’s “The Art of Power” will be released Aug. 6. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

This image provided by Simon & Schuster shows the cover of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new book, “The Art of Power.” Simon & Schuster announced Thursday, April, 18, 2024, that Pelosi’s book will be released Aug. 6. (Simon & Schuster via AP)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has completed a book about her years in public life, from legislation she helped enact to such traumatizing moments as the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol and the assault at her San Francisco home that left her husband with a fractured skull.

Simon & Schuster announced Thursday that Pelosi’s “The Art of Power” will be released Aug. 6.

“People always ask me how I did what I did in the House,” Pelosi, the first woman to become speaker, said in a statement. “In ‘The Art of Power,’ I reveal how — and more importantly, why.”

Pelosi, 84, was first elected to the House in 1987, rose to minority leader in 2003 and to speaker four years later, when the Democrats became the majority party. She served as speaker from 2007-2011, and again from 2019-2023, and was widely credited with helping to mobilize support for and pass such landmark bills as the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

She stepped away from any leadership positions after Republicans retook the majority in the 2022 elections, but she continues to represent California’s 11th district.

According to Simon & Schuster, Pelosi also will offer a “personal account” of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters rampaged through the Capitol as Congress voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. She also recounts the night in 2022 when an intruder broke into the Pelosi home and assaulted her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. (Nancy Pelosi was in Washington at the time).

“Pelosi shares that horrifying day and the traumatic aftermath for her and her family,” the publisher’s announcement reads in part.

Pelosi’s previous book, “Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters,” came out in 2008. In 2022, she was the subject of the HBO documentary “Pelosi in the House,” made by daughter Alexandra Pelosi.

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NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias

An essay from an editor at the broadcaster has generated a firestorm of criticism about the network on social media, especially among conservatives.

By Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson

NPR is facing both internal tumult and a fusillade of attacks by prominent conservatives this week after a senior editor publicly claimed the broadcaster had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage, risking its trust with audiences.

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published Tuesday by The Free Press, a popular Substack publication, that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

Mr. Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, castigated NPR for what he said was a litany of journalistic missteps around coverage of several major news events, including the origins of Covid-19 and the war in Gaza. He also said the internal culture at NPR had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

Mr. Berliner’s essay has ignited a firestorm of criticism of NPR on social media, especially among conservatives who have long accused the network of political bias in its reporting. Former President Donald J. Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to argue that NPR’s government funding should be rescinded, an argument he has made in the past.

NPR has forcefully pushed back on Mr. Berliner’s accusations and the criticism.

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” Edith Chapin, the organization’s editor in chief, said in an email to staff on Tuesday. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.” Some other NPR journalists also criticized the essay publicly, including Eric Deggans, its TV critic, who faulted Mr. Berliner for not giving NPR an opportunity to comment on the piece.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Berliner expressed no regrets about publishing the essay, saying he loved NPR and hoped to make it better by airing criticisms that have gone unheeded by leaders for years. He called NPR a “national trust” that people rely on for fair reporting and superb storytelling.

“I decided to go out and publish it in hopes that something would change, and that we get a broader conversation going about how the news is covered,” Mr. Berliner said.

He said he had not been disciplined by managers, though he said he had received a note from his supervisor reminding him that NPR requires employees to clear speaking appearances and media requests with standards and media relations. He said he didn’t run his remarks to The New York Times by network spokespeople.

When the hosts of NPR’s biggest shows, including “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” convened on Wednesday afternoon for a long-scheduled meet-and-greet with the network’s new chief executive, Katherine Maher , conversation soon turned to Mr. Berliner’s essay, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. During the lunch, Ms. Chapin told the hosts that she didn’t want Mr. Berliner to become a “martyr,” the people said.

Mr. Berliner’s essay also sent critical Slack messages whizzing through some of the same employee affinity groups focused on racial and sexual identity that he cited in his essay. In one group, several staff members disputed Mr. Berliner’s points about a lack of ideological diversity and said efforts to recruit more people of color would make NPR’s journalism better.

On Wednesday, staff members from “Morning Edition” convened to discuss the fallout from Mr. Berliner’s essay. During the meeting, an NPR producer took issue with Mr. Berliner’s argument for why NPR’s listenership has fallen off, describing a variety of factors that have contributed to the change.

Mr. Berliner’s remarks prompted vehement pushback from several news executives. Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor of standards and practices, said in an interview that he rejected all of Mr. Berliner’s claims of unfairness, adding that his remarks would probably make it harder for NPR journalists to do their jobs.

“The next time one of our people calls up a Republican congressman or something and tries to get an answer from them, they may well say, ‘Oh, I read these stories, you guys aren’t fair, so I’m not going to talk to you,’” Mr. Cavin said.

Some journalists have defended Mr. Berliner’s essay. Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, NPR’s former ombudsman, said Mr. Berliner was “not wrong” on social media. Chuck Holmes, a former managing editor at NPR, called Mr. Berliner’s essay “brave” on Facebook.

Mr. Berliner’s criticism was the latest salvo within NPR, which is no stranger to internal division. In October, Mr. Berliner took part in a lengthy debate over whether NPR should defer to language proposed by the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association while covering the conflict in Gaza.

“We don’t need to rely on an advocacy group’s guidance,” Mr. Berliner wrote, according to a copy of the email exchange viewed by The Times. “Our job is to seek out the facts and report them.” The debate didn’t change NPR’s language guidance, which is made by editors who weren’t part of the discussion. And in a statement on Thursday, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association said it is a professional association for journalists, not a political advocacy group.

Mr. Berliner’s public criticism has highlighted broader concerns within NPR about the public broadcaster’s mission amid continued financial struggles. Last year, NPR cut 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts, including the popular “Invisibilia,” as it tried to make up for a $30 million budget shortfall. Listeners have drifted away from traditional radio to podcasts, and the advertising market has been unsteady.

In his essay, Mr. Berliner laid some of the blame at the feet of NPR’s former chief executive, John Lansing, who said he was retiring at the end of last year after four years in the role. He was replaced by Ms. Maher, who started on March 25.

During a meeting with employees in her first week, Ms. Maher was asked what she thought about decisions to give a platform to political figures like Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican Party chair whose position as a political analyst at NBC News became untenable after an on-air revolt from hosts who criticized her efforts to undermine the 2020 election.

“I think that this conversation has been one that does not have an easy answer,” Ms. Maher responded.

Benjamin Mullin reports on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact Ben securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or email at [email protected] . More about Benjamin Mullin

Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email:  [email protected]   More about Katie Robertson