Is Art Ever Apolitical?
Yesterday we closed the door on this year’s Eurovision Song Contest with a sparkly, chaotic grand finale where the Swedish singer Loreen took home the trophy, becoming the first female to win two times and bringing the crown back to Sweden 50 years after ABBA won the competition with “Waterloo”. They went on to become one of the biggest acts in the canon of pop music. Over the years, Eurovision created a whole subculture around it, attracting millions of global followers, fan communities and kicked other acts into international stardom, like Celine Dion. Over time it even spread out as far as Australia.
The winning country usually gets to stage next year’s competition which means in 2024, it will be Stockholm calling. I say usually because this year, Liverpool hosted on behalf of Kyiv, which couldn’t do it due to the situation in the country. But the English compensated by throwing a show full of references and tributes to Ukraine, with the whole city densely colored in yellow and blue for a whole week. It has to be said that it was a textbook example of how to manage a project of this kind of magnitude. But it was also an example of an another part of the Eurovision folklore: politics.
Technically, the competition is apolitical by definition. They proved it by refusing to let Zelensky zoom in, since the spotlight was on music and whichever message you’re trying to communicate, it had to be done subtly and carefully. There were examples where the acts didn’t bother too much to hide it , like the Georgian representative in 2009 with their song “We dont wanna put in” which was consequently disqualified. However, the Croatian act Let 3 took the world by storm with a song aimed at Putin.
They got away with it since you didn’t know where to look during the mind-blowing performance, which made it hard to focus on the message once they took off their coats to reveal ballet skirts and high heels. The seasoned punk band from Croatia is known for performances that always have a touch of provocative statement, like roses sticking out of their buttcracks. The finale in Liverpool invites the question if art can ever be truly apolitical? Acts like the Serbian singer Konstrakta in 2022 proved that they can without looking like explicit, kitschy propaganda.
The host city is famous for being the home of important bands like The Beatles who themselves weren’t strangers to political statements dressed up as conceptual art. Most famously, it was John Lennon with Yoko Ono with their protest against the war in Vietnam, lying in bed at the Hilton in Amsterdam.
To me it looks like a photo-op that achieved nothing apart from turning performance art into an elitist political statement with “bed peace” written on a placard above. Maybe I’m just too old to be impressed by this. Stormy Daniels proved politics is vulnerable in bed only if you got Donald Trump’s sweaty manboobs firmly pressed against your own.
Art has been used to elevate agendas and achievements of power for thousands of years. From the lavish temples of the divine Augustus in Rome, Cortona’s baroque fresco celebrating the Barberini family, all the way to Damien Hirst’s bizarre portrait of Queen Elizabeth. But these are designed as an attempt of admiration or downright deification of the subject. Modern artists are rather critical in terms of aesthetic and social discourse. Andy Warhol turned celebrities into a blank canvas that projects the illusion of those proverbial 15 minutes of fame.
We’re not familiar with Cortona’s ideological preference, and that’s exactly how it should be. I remember visiting Palazzo Barberini where the breathtaking piece floats high above your your head as if it were to open up into the skies, dragging you with it into the clouds.
The piece is obviously meant to turn the mighty patriarch of the family into a supernatural hero who’s holding the sun in one hand, and your balls in the other. I can’t possibly imagine what it must have felt like to live in a place as big as this, with a seemingly endless sequence of ornate salons with a view to perfectly manicured gardens around the house.
Sometimes grotesque is best suited as the approach to things that are looming from the dark and about to crash into our unsuspecting decadence that helps ignore everything that might cause the slightest distress. Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 movie The Great Dictator, where he creates the perfect carricature of Hitler, is a warning dressed up as entertainment.
This an example of what makes Chaplin one of the biggest comedians Hollywood’s ever seen. But when we satirize hatred, it becomes entertaining and makes you laugh and Holocaust was certainly no laughing matter. In David Wrendt’s 2015 film Look Who’s Back, the German dictator wakes up in 21st century Berlin but no one takes him seriously. Behind the joke lies the fact that this is how people like him rise to power in the first place.
Satire can also be prophetic where, in hindsight, we recognize all the red flags that later turned the world into a bloody circus that’s still dancing as if there’s no tomorrow. The Bosnian equivalent of the Monty Python, Top Lista Nadrealista, shows a couple at their first date in an episode of the show. Because they don’t speak the same language, a translator helps out. However, the words he’s translating sound almost the same. Thirty years after we all laughed at them, we live in a country with three official languages for which none of us needs a translator. It’s no longer a joke because our reality is the perfect grotesque.
The artists of today have different priorities. Their work is informed by the problems of immigrants, right-wing populism and discriminations of various minorities. Marlon Brando sent the native American actress Sasheen Littlefeather to the 1973 Oscars as a protest against the their treatment in the movie industry.
Just like Lennon, the whole performance did more for Brando’s image than the issue he was fighting for. But people in her position settle for whatever they can get because America is not as kind to minorities as they would like you to believe. Since Hollywood is a jungle, if you have to play Brando’s token Indian he’s using as a microphone in a dress that makes you look like you’re auditioning for Winnetou.
The closest Loreen came to political activism is when an activist crashed her performance at the Melodiefestivalen in Stockholm last year, but he was promptly removed from the stage. Sometimes it’s just what you need. You get tired of artists preaching about things they don’t practice and marketing carefully masked by altruism.
At the core, every form of artistic action is indeed a statement that creates a tension between reality and ideas that make us look for the devil behind the joke. It takes real talent to learn the lesson the without killing the messenger. That’s why the most extraordinary art is usually the product of our darkest hours, waiting for that ray of light.
