This is an excerpt from my new NHAF article, “NHAF: Politics of Art, Art of Politics, And Such Disgusting Things”, published January 1, 2026. A few months ago, I launched the organization process for the Nazarene Human Arts Fund, or NHAF. I established it to create economic lifelines for artists facing the unpredictable disruption of generative AI, and I believe that while technology changes, the necessity of the human element in art remains absolute.
Conceiving this title alone created in my mouth a taste so bitter I would have preferred to drink hemlock. I fear that it will make people run for the hills, in spite of its shortness. How long have I strived to keep away from the poison that is politics, only for man’s stupidity to rope me back in at every turn? The person who takes a taste for politics is a masochist of his soul and a torturer of his friendship. With this understanding I envy the median voter because they do not ascribe any further thought to their vote other than the two or three values that they hold in their hearts; against this we find the unmedian voter, the specialized and politicized man, who has developed for himself a mental ideology that ultimately dictates and therefores enslaves all his living. This is the perfect description of the man who says, with impressively audacious confidence, that all art is political.
Nobody says all art is political in the lone of night. No one makes this observation unprompted, as a fleeting thought that arises when longing over the meaning of art. Instead, it has always arisen out of reaction, of response to those who say that they want to see less politics in art. In a way, everyone understands this: we distinctly recognize things that purposefully express a political character and things that don’t. However, when someone desires less politics in the art they see, and it just so happens that the politics in the art are your politics, you cannot proceed with this distinction. To give in to the person who wants less of your politics despite a very reasonable wording would be treasonous to your ever-so-correct ideology. Therefore, you have to be asinine, you have to throw away all intellectual honesty and tell them that all art is political, and therefore they are wrong, and therefore they are stupid (or perhaps dishonest), and therefore they must be accepting of the political character expressed by the art.
Read the rest here.