"So begins a question which has of late become more and more urgent: what is the relation of aesthetics to politics?"
About this Quote
An anxious drumroll hides inside Poster’s calm, academic phrasing. “So begins” signals that we’re not entering a fresh debate but stepping into a problem already in motion, as if the cultural world has been backing toward this cliff for a while and only now dares to look down. The key move is the word “urgent”: Poster isn’t treating aesthetics as a seminar topic but as a pressure point where art, media, and power have started to fuse so visibly that ignoring the connection becomes a political choice in itself.
The subtext is a rebuke to a comfortable liberal reflex: keep art “above” politics, treat beauty as a private refuge, cordon off style from coercion. Poster implies that this separation has become untenable “of late” because the machinery of politics has grown aesthetic. Campaigns are branding exercises; authority is performed through images, spectacle, and narrative choreography. In that world, aesthetics isn’t decoration on top of politics; it’s one of politics’ operating systems.
His question is also a warning to artists and critics. If politics now runs on attention, affect, and visual persuasion, then aesthetic decisions (what’s shown, what’s elegant, what feels “natural,” what goes viral) are never neutral. The “relation” he asks about isn’t a polite handshake between two fields; it’s a contested border where propaganda can masquerade as taste, and where dissent can be diluted into mere style. Poster’s restraint gives the line its bite: he’s not preaching, he’s flagging an emergency.
The subtext is a rebuke to a comfortable liberal reflex: keep art “above” politics, treat beauty as a private refuge, cordon off style from coercion. Poster implies that this separation has become untenable “of late” because the machinery of politics has grown aesthetic. Campaigns are branding exercises; authority is performed through images, spectacle, and narrative choreography. In that world, aesthetics isn’t decoration on top of politics; it’s one of politics’ operating systems.
His question is also a warning to artists and critics. If politics now runs on attention, affect, and visual persuasion, then aesthetic decisions (what’s shown, what’s elegant, what feels “natural,” what goes viral) are never neutral. The “relation” he asks about isn’t a polite handshake between two fields; it’s a contested border where propaganda can masquerade as taste, and where dissent can be diluted into mere style. Poster’s restraint gives the line its bite: he’s not preaching, he’s flagging an emergency.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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