Alain Locke on the Distinction between Art and Propaganda

[@numberThree0703]

As a fellow academic who is still struggling with the youtube addiction that I got during the pandemic, I love your videos. They are intelligent, stimulating, and inspiring. Thanks for rescuing me from another hour of foodtube binging.

[@fizzydrink9647]

Ellie, you have ignited my love for philosophy and everything it has to offer. Over the past year, I found your mini lectures and your subsequent podcast and delved deep into the philosophical texts of a myriad of different authors, concepts and subjects. Alongside the help of Dr. Michael Sugrue here on KZbin as well, I have gained perspectives and learned things that I feel infinitely grateful for and I've learned things that are invaluable to me as a person. So, for that I can't ever thank you enough. Thank you for starting this channel and introducing myself and countless others to a love and passion in philosophy.

[@Dino_Medici]

Sugrue is SO GOATED. If you haven’t seen his lecture on Descartes it’s amaze

[@leonkhachooni3287]

Thank you. Listening to the ideas you speak of brings me great joy.

[@Dave.Mustaine.Is.Genius]

Only Islam can bring the greatest Joy to human soul

[@lexparsimoniae2107]

Absolutely insightful! Thank you Anderson.

[@cowshadows]

Hey hey! Great stuff Prof Anderson.

[@M.O.1981]

This is brilliant. Thank you.

[@adriansavastian8774]

I would love to learn more from you!

[@jamescareyyatesIII]

I wonder if Locke would consider Picasso's Guernica propaganda, since the painting was a reaction to war crimes? Is the Guernica self-contained?

[@eternalreturnforeternity]

Can there be more videos that explain life and social events with philosophical theories, or how to understand a matter from the perspectives and terms of several philosophers, and add some comments on their limitations?

[@OverthinkPodcastPhilosophy]

If this is your area of interest, we strongly recommend you listen to our podcast! We have a lot of episodes like this. You can hear them wherever you listen to podcasts, on our overthinkpodcast.com website, or in our KZbin channel playlist "Podcast Episodes"

[@robertalenrichter]

Some forms lend themselves much more to propaganda, but those also call for a more nuanced term. A movie can reflect the societal norms of its era without any conscious attempt to sway or mould, so it's all a bit vague as to what he means by this highly determined, loaded word, let alone in the context of the gigantic category we call "art". On the other hand, opposing free, individualistic, self-contained art to propaganda is a congenial way of validating the romantic thread in modernism, which still found academic approbation through much of the 20th century. One might suggest that there's more than a little propaganda in contemporary discourse.

[@a.e.jabbour5003]

Thank you for this. It was very informative, and IMO couldn't be more timely. I believe that art (granted, difficult to define) and propaganda are explicitly distinct. I believe one is primarily internal, while the other, both in definition and execution, is wholly external. If there is not some pre-determined goal(s) to any work of propaganda, then I would argue it isn't propoganda at all. While even if there is some explicit goal to be achieved with a work of art, I would argue that all art is created to primarily create dialogue, provoke feeling and introspection, and/or alter one's relationship to the world. They must be separate, since they are created with wholly different and separate intents and desired conclusions.

[@_VISION.]

Finally someone with a brain in this comment section

[@BillyMcBride]

Those of the Harlem Renaissance had to fight against a very oppressive society who did not want to be inclusive to their art. It happens today too, and I hope that things will get better eventually when we realize that we need creativity and originality from wherever and whomever it comes. Creativity is just as blind as love or justice to those to whom it affects.

[@Dino_Medici]

Love all the art talk ⚡️

[@rhiyabhattacharyya880]

How to spot when art is being used as an instrument of propaganda?

[@moravianlion3108]

Funnily enough, this reminded me the time I was selling oil paintings during high school and ended up creating some nationalistic pieces. It was quite shamelessly just about getting them sold and I think that's where I stopped with painting entirely. I can already see them being purchased by the type of people I wouldn't normally even talk to. This was an interesting take on the subject. Thank you for bringing this to us. As to someone who doesn't dive too often into philosophy, your KZbin channel is a great gateway into it. Also, I really like your today's look. Very tasteful and pleasing on the eye. Have a great weekend!

[@miraadi97]

Propaganda with art can have major cultural changes which can be democratic and anti democratic and the morals of this reactionary thing might just not be good or bad propaganda but instead a thriving thing to ❓; to inquire towards the constitutionalistic society with revolutionary thinking which in turn might ignite the self contained art of democracy. Thanks for the short essay ❤.

[@johng4609]

I agree with DuBois and Orwell that art is synonymous with propaganda. Locke's distinctions and categorizations seem arbitrary and stilted, imposing kludgy expectations on who/what artist, artwork and art experiencer are and do

[@_VISION.]

It's obvious that to Locke art is rooted in an expression of an emotion, purely for the sake of expressing it. Propaganda on the other hand has the intention of USING art for some bipartisan and political aim. They are not the same.

[@malekekko8449]

Pause at 4:15. What does that even mean. I understand the concept of the minor having to fight for rites against the major. But to me, those words, minor and major, being used to describe a human life is something i cannot wrap my brain around. (Minority this, majority that, the human experience must be one hell of a fiction for the future to read. It all seems foolish and childish and without a foundation worth standing on.) Internet do as u do. "Suplicate," why use that language.

[@lambdasun4520]

it is marxist dialectic (master - slave, oppressor - oppressed), you will learn to hate this pseudo-philosophy with time.

[@malekekko8449]

All of it is streaked through with isms that have came and passed. Yet we are unable as a species, not a race, to challenge, ignore, or allow a reconfiguration of thinkers of yore. I just get tired of this. Suppose a million years from now someone finds this footage. We, in our modern understanding think that they will be falling over themselves to analyze the meaning behind the footage. We are not Mesopotanpia or Ancient Egypt or Rome, or any of the thoughtful folks who came out of that. We are imprinted permanently on ssd's and other drives. It all seems foolish. Keep the maths and sciences, return the philosophies. Those future hopefuls will know exactly how we lived our lives. So why not plant a check point here. Now. So when they look back, they can say, "fuck, those before them truly were mad. Glad they stopped ridding their philosophical phalics." Then we all laugh. In spirit ofcourse, because we would all be dead.

[@_VISION.]

I guess you mustve missed the context and the kind of America Alain Locke was living in

[@anugnad]

❤

[@doylesaylor]

Locke’s comments on propaganda and art has two significant flaws to me. First is the idea art is complete in itself coming out of the artist. That sounds like bourgeois individualism. Or if the artist is using realism to express theirselves ignoring how realism is shared by all who see. Secondly, propaganda is a tool of governance, of partisanship, how does one regulate partisanship in the unique artist? To stand back and seem to be non partisan seems to validate formalist abstraction as if a form is neutral. That argument has gone on for a long time in capitalist culture, but posed like this to me offers little understanding of what abstraction offers in meaning. Why partisanship arises.

[@pcdm43145]

"...All art is, to some extent, propaganda..." -- George Orwell, _On Dickens,_ 1940

[@idontknowlloyd]

just a fellow elephant passenger stroking ones chin whilst puckering duck lips here 😁

[@propos05]

While Jacques Louis David may have been a propagandist for Napoleon and Marat, his images fall into the category of art in my opinion.

[@livethemoment5148]

I believe we are truly living in the end of times. Now, I know this may sound like a common and cliche type of thought since people throughout history have always thought their own present was in fact the end of times. How do philosophers like you think about this? If you consider the exponential way in which the human enterprise has grown, not just in population , in the last 200 years, but in consumption and waste...to such an extent that we have turned our planet into a cesspool created by humanity's activities...I truly believe that this exponential growth will crash soon (by 2050) and lead to human extinction, I think very certainly you , those in your twenties and thirties will definitely get to see human extinction first hand. I am in my late fifties so I am not sure if I will live to see and witness the end of humanity. I am also atheist.

[@darrensurff8554]

Art is a point of view ,thus an unbalanced minds art is propaganda ,probably yeah I think so ,not really sure ,who the fk is anyway 😅😅😅😅😅

[@ryanlall9525]

propaganda is reactionary ( but so is art ? )

[@lambdasun4520]

What you discuss in the first two minutes of the video is just the theory of forms under a different name, it was already discovered and discussed in ancient times and later by Spengler. Art-forms depend on the internal state of their creator (the ideal and hidden forms), which are influenced by cultural background, life-experiences of the artist, physiognomy, culture, genetics, zeitgeist. Also, I hate this dialectical reasoning: revolution vs. reaction, oppressor vs oppressor.

[@_VISION.]

What was the point of this comment?

[@tysonbrinacombe]

​@_VISION. It's clearly propaganda

[@Filmaker25]

Propaganda you mean the news lol