My college art history professor had one simple message he desperately tried to drill into the minds of his students. Throughout his survey of fine art from Renaissance to Modernism, Professor Lavertu would repeat again and again, “All art is propaganda!” 1 And he was right.
All Art Is Propaganda
Paintings like David’s “Death of Marat” 2 were quite literally the propaganda of the French Revolution. The painter, Jacques-Louis David, served the revolutionary government under Robespierre as a ‘dictator of the arts’. And David took commissions from the government to paint propaganda that martyrized revolutionaries like Jean-Paul Marat.
Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars” 3 is less political, but no less propaganda. The painting depicts a post-coitus scene between the goddess of love and the god of war. Mars sleeps deeply as Venus looks at him in triumphant satisfaction. The painting’s message isn’t subtle at all. ‘Love conquers War’.
In Caravaggio’s “David with the Head of Goliath” 4, the painter uses biblical motifs to appeal to the Pope. After killing a man in a duel, Caravaggio was forced to flee Rome and live years in exile. But racked with guilt, he sent this painting of a grim David holding up the head of a beaten and pathetic Caravaggio to the papal court as a symbol of his penance and a plea for a pardon.
Sometimes the propaganda is obvious, sometimes less so. But ultimately Professor Lavertu showed us that no art is created in a vacuum. All art responds, reacts and makes some sort of argument. But subsequently I’ve come to think that rhetoric is better word. All art is rhetoric.
Art Responds to What Came Before It
The Baroque period was a reaction to the Renaissance. Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment. And Post-Modernism reacts to Modernism. We cannot remove ourselves from context. Kenneth Burke, an American rhetorician and literary critic, explained it like this:
“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.” 5
Art is an unending conversation that began thousands of years ago. And it will stretch thousands of years into the future. Whether it’s a painting or a erotic novel or a rap song, art reacts to the reality that surrounds it.
Take, for example, Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes”6. Painted ten years later, it attempts to recreate Caravaggio’s famous “Judith Beheads Holofernes”7. But where Caravaggio’s Judith is lithe and dainty, Gentileschi’s Judith is bold and powerful. Whether she intended it or not, Gentileschi’s painting is a feminist reinterpretation of the painting she was trained to mimic. It’s rhetorical: When we create art, we communicate. And we communicate in response to our experiences.
All Art Is Rhetoric
Rhetoric is often associated with politicians and advertisers. Many rhetoricians will say that rhetoric must persuade an audience to action! But Kenneth Burke broadened his definition to include not just action, but attitude.
In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke says, “Insofar as a choice of action is restricted, rhetoric seeks rather to have a formative effect upon attitude” 8. So, sure. Politicians use rhetoric to persuade you to vote for them. And commercials use rhetoric to convince you to buy cereal. But where some people don’t have the agency to make those choices on their own, rhetoric tries to simply bend their attitude, leaning or inclination. And Burke says:
“Thus the notion of persuasion to attitude would permit the application of rhetorical terms to purely poetic structures; the study of lyrical devices might be classed under the head of rhetoric, when these devices are considered for their power to induce or communicate states of mind to readers, even though the kinds of assent evoked have no overt, practical outcome.”
So maybe a love song doesn’t have a ‘call to action’. But it is still rhetorical, in that it attempts to evoke an emotion from its audience. It communicates an idea.
Rhetorical Art Doesn’t Need to Be Didactic
But if all art is rhetoric, then what separates art from a thesis paper? Well, if done right, art doesn’t need to have an “overt, practical outcome.” It can just be good. In the early 90s, the New York Times interviewed Maurice Sendak, writer of Where the Wild Things Are. They asked him what sorts of stories children like, and Sendak said:
“They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something, not didactic things, but passionate things.” 9
“Passionate things” make it good. Where a rhetorical audience may not have much agency (like with children), passionate things affect attitude and induce states of mind. Not preaching. Not didactic things; beautiful things.
Make Beautiful Things
Saul Bass—the graphic designer behind some of the Mid-Century’s most famous brand icons, movie posters and advertisements—was once asked how he felt about working in advertisement. Bass said his goal was just to make beautiful things:
“I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” 10
Bass created advertisements to sell things. His work was rhetorical, in that it motivated consumers to buy things. But his art was rhetorical in another sense as well. Saul Bass created beautiful things. And it’s that beauty and that passion that turn it into art. Bass was not just an ad man. He was an artist.
- Lavertu, Glenn | 2008
- David, Jacques-Louis | “Death of Marat” | 1793
- Botticelli, Sandro | “Venus and Mars” | 1485
- Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da | “David with the Head of Goliath” | 1610
- Burke, Kenneth | “Ritual Drama as ‘Hub'” | The Philosophy of Literary Form | 1941
- Gentileschi, Artemisia | “Judith Slaying Holofernes” | 1610
- Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da | “Judith Beheads Holofernes” | 1599
- Burke, Kenneth | “Persuasion” | Chapter 1: “Traditional Principles of Rhetoric” | A Rhetoric of Motives | 1950
- Lyall, Sarah | “Maurice Sendak Sheds Moonlight on a Dark Tale” | New York Times | 20 Sept 1993
- archieboston | “Saul Bass: On Making Money vs Quality Work” | 2010