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“I’m tired of politics, I just want to talk about my art,” I sometimes hear artists—and musicians, actors, writers, etc.—say. And I sometimes see their fans say, “you should shut up about politics and just talk about your art.” Given the current onslaught of political news, commentary, scandal, and alarm, these are both understandable sentiments. But anyone who thinks that art and politics once occupied separate spheres harbors a historically naïve belief. The arts have always been political, and all the more so during times of high drama and tension like the one we live in now. We can look, for example, to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, just to mention three particularly striking historical examples.
