Politics are in every facet of our lives, whether we like it or not, either consciously or subconsciously influencing the world around us. Politics affects many aspects of our society even when there is no direct correlation. What we’re taught, what we learn, why do we learn it? These things directly affect how we feel about things and how we view the world. It influences and can even change the way we think. Art is nothing more than our thoughts and feelings put into the creative medium of our choice to reflect our own reality in some facet.

Art is just our mind channeling what we know and what we feel into another space for a different interpretation, which is why art and pieces of art can mean many different things to many different people. It reflects what you have lived and why you lived that way. Art has always been a reflection of the artist’s reality, even ancient cave paintings can tell us that much. Unlike those cave paintings, modern lives are not only infinitely complicated and complex, they are chock-full of variety based on the politics surrounding the events in their life.

These factors based in our evolved society then make the art being produced in said society, more complicated. Topics like the eradication of homophobia and extensive responses to racism have entered the social consciousness and those factors and how they are affecting the lives of those on either side of these issues can be played out in art. That is the nature of art after all: showcasing your experiences.

I think people do not like the idea of art being political is because they either disagree with politics that they observe from the art, any movie where they call attention to the fact that a character is gay for example, or because they do not like the idea of politics being so baked into our everyday lives that it even expresses itself in our creative works without that being the express purpose. I can see why this scares people because when you think of politics, you think about yelling relatives at Thanksgiving and misinformation on every news platform. In my opinion, politics is the way our world is framed based on people’s experiences, relationships, and morals.

There is a third group of people who I think do not understand why art is inherently political because they only look at the surface level. These people are very similar to the others who disagree with my point but they have no reason. They just do not understand or see what the rest of us see. They do not fully understand that art, even the most basic, comes from a meticulous place where everything is done for a reason, even if the artist is not fully aware of why they are doing it at the time.

Art in essence is based on the realities of the people making it and those realities, whether directly or indirectly, are rooted in something political.