Right-Wing Politics and the Death of Art

Politics and art, the toxic mix

6 min read

Just now

A topic I’ve been thinking about recently, which is both interesting and also very depressing in terms of how it often manifests in everyday life, is art and art criticism. It’s not exactly a secret that people like to critique or analyse various pieces of media and art in the public eye, from movies, to music to video games and paintings. What does become a little bit of a problem is how these critiques come about and the nature of the critiques themselves.

What I mean by this is, we live in a world where everything is sensationalised, and combine this with the social media age, everyone is looking for clicks and more eyes on the content they put out. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all, we all put out content and messages because we want our voices to be heard. The problem arises when people start critiquing art in a way that is fundamentally shallow and is only indicative of toxic, often bigoted biases people have.

By far, I think one of the best examples of this is when we look at video games. As I’ve written before, anti-woke gamers have become an industry, and there are entire YouTube channels seemingly devoted solely to attacking so-called woke games. Woke does not mean what the term was originally coined as, that being awareness of racial injustice, but…