Back Story, our new culture column, aims to encompass the fun and the profound, both movie stars and semiotics, while unpicking the zeitgeist and sharing enthusiasms. Written by A.D. Miller, our culture editor and a Booker-shortlisted novelist
A SHOWBOATING COLUMNIST is Britain’s prime minister. A reality-TV star became the leader of the free world. An actor who played a fictional president in a Ukrainian comedy show was elected to be the real one. The news is a rolling row over whose statues should be pulled down, whether and which books should be pulped, which artists ought to be feted and who is beyond the pale.
One of the most insightful takes on the relationship between politics and culture comes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, an essay by Walter Benjamin that was published in 1935. Fascism was turning politics into an aesthetic experience, he argued, a process bound to “culminate in one thing: war”. Already, mankind stood primed to “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure”. Communism’s response, as he saw it, was to politicise art.
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