Art as Political Discourse

Simoniti, Vid ORCID: 0000-0001-5832-9587 (2021) Art as Political Discourse BRITISH JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS, 61 (4). pp. 559-574. ISSN 0007-0904, 1468-2842

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Abstract

Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to political discourse, or does it merely reflect the insights of political science and political philosophy' Here I argue for indispensability of art to political discourse by building on the debate about artistic cognitivism, the view that art is a source of knowledge. Different artforms, I suggest, make available specific epistemic resources, which allow audiences to overcome epistemic obstacles that obtain in a given ideological situation. My goal is to offer a general model for identifying cognitive advantages for artworks belonging to distinct artforms and genres (e.g. satire, visibility-raising artworks, caricatures, and so on), in a way that can account for each artwork's historical and cultural specificity. More speculatively, however, my account also comments on the ancient struggle between philosophy and the arts as competing modes of persuasion, and expands our notion of legitimate political discourse to include a greater plurality of discursive genres.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	5003 Philosophy, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 36 Creative Arts and Writing
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	29 Oct 2021 07:24
Last Modified:	16 Jun 2026 11:00
DOI:	10.1093/aesthj/ayab018
Related Websites:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3141952
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