Ian Sharp

This Orwell quote, and the other often paraphrased as "all art is political," is one of the most abused sentences in the English language. Orwell means it in the relatively narrow sense that all works of art will contain the political presuppositions of the artist. Art does not have to be actively or consciously political, but its assumptions - say, about what is right and what is wrong - count as political attitudes. This is true of everything from War & Peace to Treasure Island. But most of those who parrot the line today use it to excuse active politicking — the very propaganda Orwell warns against. If all art is political then it is fine that my work is about my politics, and you are a fool if you reject my politics, because all art is political. In The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda, Orwell takes aim at precisely this sort of sloppy, motivated reasoning: "If we look back at the English literature of the last ten years not so much at the literature as at the prevailing literary attitude, the thing that strikes us is that it has almost ceased to be aesthetic. Literature has been swamped by propaganda. I do not mean that all the books written during that period have been bad. But the characteristic writers of the time... have been didactic, political writers, aesthetically conscious, of course, but more interested in subject-matter than in technique. And the most lively criticism has nearly all of it been the work of Marxist writers... who look on every book virtually as a political pamphlet and are far more interested in digging out its political and social implications than in its literary qualities in the narrow sense." Orwell thought the first position - an awareness of art's political assumptions - was good and valuable, because it reminds us that art is of our world, and this understanding helps us spot propaganda when it disguises itself as pure aestheticism. But he deplored the second position - the conscious politicisation of art, and the view that art must be actively political to be good - "...because it caused countless young writers to try to tie their minds to a political discipline which, if they had stuck to it, would have made mental honesty impossible. The only system of thought open to them at that time was official Marxism...". Honesty is impossible in such circumstances, he said, because making art the slave of contemporary politics makes it dependent, in the end, on grubby temporal scheming. The bold Marxist writers who devoted their art to that vision of utopia were totally undone by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Art cannot pretend at utopian principles while it sources its morality from the real business of politics. When political art comes into conflict with the needs of ideology, the art, not the ideology, gets sacrificed. "Just as many writers about 1930 had discovered that you cannot really be detached from contemporary events, so many writers about 1939 were discovering that you cannot really sacrifice your intellectual integrity for the sake of a political creed — or at least you cannot do so and remain a writer."