The power of political art

This weekend’s Sunday NYT Magazine also (in addition to the Dean article noted below) has a fascinating piece about political art, and it reemergence in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Jesse Green notes: “ But in art, emotional ripeness trumps statistical reality. Incorrect things can be true enough because art is always a supposition that becomes a history, not the other way around.” And again: “Compassion (in name if not in fact) became normative, which obviated the need for the ribbon in the first place. This idea was taken to its logical extreme with the AIDS quilt. Begun as a local San Francisco phenomenon, it eventually got too big to be seen. Along the way, it changed its meaning: not for the individual quilters who sewed panels in tribute to dead friends and lovers but for the people who experienced it. A private act of mourning became a public consolation, and part of what it consoled the public for was its failure to care in time. Like most activists, Larry Kramer says he hates the quilt for that reason; we do not deserve to be consoled so easily. But insofar as consolation is part of the humanity we want to preserve in ending AIDS, I find myself willing to let that pass. What the quilt did was what quilting as a folk art had always done: bind the individual to society in the necessary acts of remembering and continuing.” By my count this is two stunning pieces in one magazine that both evoke the deeply religious elements of contemporary media culture practices.