Argument Essay: Protest Art Vs. Protest

Art critic Clement Greenberg once said, “I don’t see art as having ever, in a real sense, affected the course of human affairs.” The sentiment here is that any “art” which has an impact on the world becomes propaganda or craft. However, the people who postulate this sentiment are the ones who use art for the crudest of purposes: the art market. It’s the same logic as saying that education has no purpose outside the world of work and consumption. When art becomes liberated from the demands of the market, it gains the power to transform our lives. This is the point at which art intersects with protest. “Political” art can be safely cloistered behind glass sheets in a museum, where it will claim to soothe the wounds from which it came. In contrast, protest art, or the art of social movements, cannot be commodified, because when it is, it ceases to be protest art. Analogous to this logic is how an internet meme ceases to be funny once it is commodified. Protest art does not (merely) depict the world; it modifies it. Protest art often makes use of the …show more content…
Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek, a former professor at UCLA, writes, “Waldemar Fydrych (the founder of T.O.A.) and his colleagues suggested many times that the absurdity of everyday life in Poland is, by itself, a gigantic, perpetual happening. The only thing needed to reveal this absurdity is to sharpen the image. A situation is then created in which people, while observing a happening, see themselves and recognize themselves in it.” The Orange Alternative accomplished this several times. One happening involved demonstrators running around in the street with t-shirts that read “galloping inflation”. After being arrested by the police, they congratulated them, declaring that the state had finally been able to stop “galloping