Fernando Tesón, guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting post on political art as "a noteworthy case of discourse failure":

Thanks to the emotional power of beauty, art can, at least sometimes, help noble ideals reach the general public. Many of these works have great artistic value (Picasso's Guernica, for example), and some of them have surely contributed to worthy causes.

However, political art is a special form of discourse failure. Art is a type of concrete imagery, and as such it evokes a “fact” that may activate default theories in the audience. Those willing to challenge the political stances represented by the artifact have to overcome the suggestive power of beauty. Political paintings (say, Diego Rivera’s murals) often suggest causal connections that, for the reasons I indicated in my previous posts, permeate theories that people hold by default. Political art’s appeal to emotion usurps reasoned political argument. If you think big oil is responsible for the evils in the world, make an argument. The movie Syriana will not do. (A related puzzle: why is all political art of the left? We have answers to this too.)

Read on for Tesón's thoughts; while he’s being largely slammed in the Volokh’s comments section for his dreaded use of “all”, this seems like a reaonable post to posit something I noticed when visiting the newly revamped and much-expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York this summer. There seemed to be much more anti-American political art on public display than when I visited there seemingly every other week in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, the more propagandistic pieces were largely confined to less public areas, such as the small reference library that was then located on MoMA's third or fourth floor:

Their library requires permission to use, and its material isn't allowed out of the room, and it isn't open to the general public. MoMA maintains a cool, professional face in its public spaces. But the walls of its reference library were festooned (at least at the time) with all sorts of anti-American and anti-Reagan (yes, I know--I was there around 1993 or '94, but this stuff was still proudly displayed) posters.

Curiously, despite having plowed millions and millions of dollars into renovating the museum, and, presumably eager to get some return on their expenditures by keeping visitors happy and coming back, MoMA seems much more willing to let this type of stuff hang out there in the public these days.

Or, maybe this is what visitors to MoMA expect to see these days, and they are keeping them happy. But it was certainly a noticeable shift in the new digs.