Art and Its Revolutionary Potential

By Raul Martinez

Our perceptual environment is saturated with cultural products that capture our attention, entertain and distract. Yet, because they are funded and disseminated to maximise the profits of this or that megacorporation, they typically fail to satisfy our deeper hunger for meaning and beauty. By contrast, art offers nourishment, food for the soul. This implies a conception of health: art can make us better somehow. Wiser perhaps.

The analogy can be pushed further: cravings for sugar, fat, and salt once helped our ancestors survive scarcity; today, surrounded by excess, these ancient reward circuits are systematically exploited. Addiction has become one of the great engines of modern commerce. Whole industries now specialise in hijacking once useful instincts. This also applies to culture. The commodification of sex, violence, and superficiality profits from entrenched biological responses. Algorithms have perfected the manipulation of our needs, keeping us hooked by exploiting our anger, arousal, fear, and disgust. The vacuum of meaning, beauty and goodness this leaves inside often keeps us coming back for more.

Art is an honorific term, one that resists definition, but the nourishment it offers is very real. In his classic account of life in a concentration camp, Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl makes it clear that beauty, in whatever form it may come, is no luxury:

As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor—or maybe because of it—we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long.

At our most fragile and vulnerable— when life cracks us open—we are unusually receptive to the beauty around us, aware of its transcendent power. Frankl describes how, despite being worked to the bone and pushed to their physical limit, prisoners with privileged positions within the camp—those who were forced to collaborate—made time for poetry, songs and jokes. Even ordinary prisoners, utterly exhausted, attended these gatherings, often missing meals to do so. As clear an illustration as you’ll get that bread alone is not enough: we need roses, too.

Today, we have more access to art than ever before. Mere clicks away for anyone with an internet connection, an abundance of films, music and literature awaits. Though it requires conscious effort in a predatory landscape intent on capturing our finite attention, ample sources of cultural nourishment are within reach. Yet, despite this treasure trove, the impulse to create remains undimmed, for the act of creation—individually and collectively—with all its messy complications, is itself uniquely meaningful. An alchemic process by which we can turn experience into beauty. When creation is collective, the process is an end in itself, one well suited to strengthening the bonds of community on which resistance depends.

It is no coincidence that much of the most powerful art emerges from the oppressed. From the cotton fields of the American South to the prisons of apartheid South Africa, from Indigenous lands to urban streets, from jazz and the blues to Nina Simone and Langston Hughes, from Mexican muralism to the magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the marginalised and the poor demonstrate what mystics have long known, that suffering is the soil in which our sensitivity to beauty grows.

The most profound contribution of art is easily missed. Through deep encounters with beauty, we access a mode of awareness more essential—and more enduring—than any of its instantiations. Art is participatory. What we experience as art emerges from a meeting between the perceiver and the perceived. Art’s power does not reside in artefacts. It is a relationship. The perceiver as much as the perceived is responsible for the experience. To be deeply moved by an epic tale or subtle sonnet we must approach it in the right way, opening ourselves, becoming present, attentive, still. It requires a calming of the mind, an opening of the heart.

Sages over millennia have taught how this open, present state can be cultivated without any external catalyst. Whether it is Meister Eckhart or Thich Nhat Hanh, the same message can be found: altering the perceiver alters the perceived. In the right state of mind, the apparently ordinary, trivial and routine acquire deep meaning, beauty and salience. Beauty lives not in the object, but in the quality of attention we bring to it. This may be what the legendary Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky once tried to articulate:

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

This is an empowering idea. We all know that in a distracted state of mind, we can miss the latent value of exquisite paintings, prose and plays. In the same way, we can miss the wonder of life itself, moment to moment, breath to breath. We miss it when our attention is fractured, disturbed, clouded. We miss it when ego dominates.

Where does political transformation enter the picture? I would suggest that though the creation and experience of art can have far-reaching political consequences, it will forever resist co-optation for political ends. Political struggle aims at challenging and redistributing power by organising, influencing, and uniting people around compelling narratives and identities. The fight to survive the selection pressures of political life—even when that fight is noble—demands compromise and calculation. This is not to deny genuine overlap. As Orwell pointed out ‘The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude’. Politics is an integral part of life. We need more art in our politics, and more politics in our art. Indeed, the choices we make in the domain of politics can themselves be a form of art. Choices are creative acts, a form of communication that can inspire, uplift and nourish. They can, in and of themselves, be beautiful.

Orwell, however, goes too far when he writes that ‘All art is propaganda’.Though lines are routinely blurred, and any strict taxonomy is doomed to failure, the difference lies in their relationship to truth: art seeks revelation, not persuasion; understanding, not blame; insight, not victory. Art with explicit political themes does not simply aim to alter the beliefs stored away in our heads. It aims to move us, change how we feel, expand our understanding—all in ways that could never be reduced to a slogan, ideology or manifesto. The best of Charlie Chaplin and Ken Loach are wonderful examples. Art communicates holistically, connecting us to numerous others and long-alienated parts of ourselves.

It would be a mistake to try to turn our artistic creations into the handmaidens of political revolution. An education in power and its abuses plays an essential role in struggles for change and art will always amplify the power of this effort. But, though there can be meaningful overlap with art, political education is a different endeavour, one to which the heights of human creativity can never be reduced. Instrumentalising art always risks robbing it of depth and complexity. One of art’s virtues is that, unfettered by the intense demands of worldly power competition, it can keep us honest, reminding us that reality is richer than the models of it we adopt. That truth lives beyond group-sanctioned dogmas, beyond the certainties of good and bad, us and them.

Civilisation will not survive long without mass political resistance, but alone it cannot solve our most pressing problems, the deep evolutionary roots of which have generated warfare, domination and inequality for ten thousand years. Navigating these problems will require a transformation of both inner and outer worlds: something like a civilisational redesign alongside a cultural enlightenment. For those open to it, art is a passage into fuller, richer ways of being, from which elements of this enlightenment might emerge. Each time we tread this path, we are changed in ways that send ripples, large and small, through the collective consciousness. This cultural process transcends the familiar pattern of expansion, corruption, decay and collapse that mark the life cycle of human societies. It is deeper, slower, longer.

The revolutionary potential of art does not lie primarily in its capacity to foment struggle, though this may be a secondary effect. Its potential is not distant and societal, but immediate and personal, with each private transformation opening up possibilities at the level of the whole. Art is a means of altering consciousness here and now, of changing the quality of our attention, of eroding the psychological walls that enclose our hearts, cage our imagination and dull our sensitivity. Its potential lies not in the realm of doing but being. From the altered consciousness that it invites us to access, new worlds are revealed— worlds in which the line between the mundane and the magnificent dissolves. Such inner revolutions are the foundation on which any lasting outer revolution will be built.