10 February 2008: Art and politics...

10 February 2008: Art and politics…

“A lot of Mexicans were communists. That’s the take home message of this room.” Of course, he was being facetious as he attempted to distill all the paintings in the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Merida (MACAY) into a single, six-word take home message. Nonetheless, his comment managed to remind me that behind every painting, every sketch, and every sculpture lays a message and more often than not, that message is political in some way, shape, or form. And as I admired the so called “communist” art, I realized that when it comes to art and politics, the idea of communism may be one of the most recurring motifs. But despite its aesthetic appeal, the majority of people I know believe that the beauty of communism is enticing but ultimately deceptive. They are convinced that communism is a quintessential example of how an idea can be, as the cliché goes, good in theory but not in practice.

And as these thoughts whirled through my head, I felt art doing what it does best: inspiring me to re-examine the world around me and my assumptions about it. As you may have guessed, in this particular exhibit, I felt compelled to revisit the theme of communism, its aesthetic appeal, and ultimately, its theoretical validity. What I realized was that like every social structure, the theory behind sociopolitical structures is based upon certain assumptions about human nature. Thus, in an oversimplified sense, one can argue that at the crux of communism is the transcendental assumption that human nature is intrinsically good while at the heart of capitalism lies the assumption that human nature is inherently selfish. However, neither assumption is right or wrong for I am convinced that, in reality, human nature is characterized by an intrinsic duality: our propensity for evil is held in dialectic tension with our capacity for benevolence.

Thus, there are truths in communism just as there are truths in capitalism. Yet as human beings, our nature yearns for a higher synthesis¸ one that acknowledges our inclination towards selfishness and places it in a system of checks and balances with our gift of goodwill. Such a structure, one that correctly identifies the essence of human nature, is the only one that can be truly successful. I would argue that such a structure has already been found: democracy. After all, democracy was formed out of the recognition that man, especially one with absolute power, cannot be trusted. But it was forged out of and continued to prevail because of man’s capacity to do good. In light of this, the US has effectively incorporated democratized its political sphere. For me, like many Mexican artists before me, the real question is will society be able to do the same for its sphere of production?