“If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust. That’s a pejorative term in critical circles now: if a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow it’s tainted. My feeling is just the opposite: if it has none, it is tainted. […] It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.” —Toni Morrison
A lot has changed since Morrison penned that passage in a 1984 essay. These days, it’s hard to enjoy, much less take seriously, a piece of art that props itself up as sunny, apolitical, without social context—just look at the critical backlash against milquetoast TV show Ted Lasso, for example.
In fact, the Mercury didn’t set out to make a Fall Arts Guide package entirely about political art—but once we started to get a sense of what we’d be covering, that became the obvious theme.