The belief that art is inherently good—common in arts advocacy, arts education, and arts activism—is both understandable and wrong. It is understandable because art can do extraordinary things: build empathy, create community, shift the terms of public life. It is wrong because art’s power has never been exclusive to those ends. And the failure to reckon with that fact is making the people who care most about art less effective, not more.
I am, without reservation, a believer in art—in art’s importance, in its power, in the necessity of fighting for it. I have been immersed in art for as long as I can remember. I grew up surrounded by the fine arts, mass media, and critical dialogue: I studied them formally, have practiced them professionally, and have spent over a decade working in public art, social-impact art, and arts policy. I say this not to establish credentials but to be transparent that this argument is coming from an art lover. What follows is a practitioner’s concern about a premise that I believe is weakening the very cause I have spent my career advancing.
We tend to reach for the word “art” at galleries, concert halls, and theater marquees. But art is not just a sector. It is the breath of human existence. It is how we make meaning, signal belonging, process grief, imagine alternatives, and transmit culture across time. Art is everywhere, and as a result many of us do not notice it. It is the food on your plate, shaped by centuries of culinary tradition, dialogue, and experimentation. It is the clothes on your body, the design of the chair you are sitting in, the music playing in the background of your commute. It is the short video that made you laugh this morning and the image that made you cry last week. It is the architecture of your city, the logo on your coffee cup, the rhythm of language in a speech that changed your mind—or someone else’s.
Beyond the individual experience with art, the economic evidence for art’s impact, although underappreciated, is striking. At 4.2% of the U.S. GDP, arts and cultural production represent a significant and chronically undercounted share of the economy (Americans for the Arts, 2023)—a greater share of GDP than sectors such as agriculture, mining, and transportation. Creative industries anchor urban economies (Kresge Foundation & Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, 2019; Stern & Seifert, 2017) and drive innovation in sectors far beyond their own; arts clusters are associated with measurable increases in broader economic productivity and entrepreneurial activity (Lichtenberg et al., 2008; Yum, 2024). The health evidence is growing: research in medicine, psychology, and public health increasingly documents art’s positive impact on mental health, cognitive resilience, social cohesion, and even physical recovery (Jensen et al., 2024; State of the Field Committee, 2009; Van der Steen et al., 2017). Most compelling of all is a case developed rigorously by Robert Putnam, that the presence of active arts and culture may be a stronger predictor of responsive government and vibrant economies than the other way around (Putnam, 1993).
And yet, for a force this pervasive and this consequential, we think about art with surprising imprecision. Particularly—and this is where I want to press—those of us who care about it most.
That art is inherently good is rarely stated explicitly; rather, it more often operates as a background assumption, structurally present in how arts advocacy is framed, how arts education is designed, how arts organizations describe their missions, and how initiatives aimed at using art for social impact understand their own work. It is the invisible grammar of a great deal of well-intentioned arts discourse: art humanizes, art increases compassion, art is on the right side of history.
This assumption is even visible in the pages of this journal. Recent issues have explored how art bridges scientific understanding—from cosmology to public health—demonstrating that art’s reach and impact extend well beyond its own sector (Henebry & Baublitz, 2021; Miller et al., 2021). That work is important, and the evidentiary case it builds is real. But several pieces in these pages, in making the case for art’s capacity to motivate and mobilize—around climate action, around public health, around social change (Fleming & Levitin, 2024)—carry within them an assumption that deserves examination: that establishing that art is impactful is the same as establishing that its power flows in a single positive direction, and that when art is deployed in support of causes we recognize as good, its power is reliably an asset rather than a variable requiring thoughtful deployment. This is not a criticism of that work. It is an observation about the premise underneath it, one that this essay invites the journal’s own readership to examine.
The assumption has deep roots. Its philosophical origins trace to ancient Greek thought, specifically, the concept of kalokagathon, which links beauty and goodness as inseparable qualities, treating aesthetic and moral merit as two expressions of the same underlying excellence. In the Symposium, Plato presents beauty as the most visible manifestation of the Good itself, the path through which love of physical beauty ascends toward wisdom and moral excellence (Plato, 360 B.C.E./1993, pp. 201d–212b). In his sweeping intellectual history of beauty, Umberto Eco traces how this equation persisted and transformed across Western thought, from medieval theology through the Renaissance to Romanticism, always returning to the premise that the beautiful and the good are, at some fundamental level, the same (Eco, 2004). That tradition was enormously generative and has shaped aesthetic thought for millennia, and its influence persists today in the often unstated premise that what is beautiful or moving is therefore virtuous. In more than a decade of professional practice across the arts sector, I have encountered this assumption among individuals spanning the full ecosystem of arts engagement, including practitioners, administrators, funders, audience members, and advocates alike. The assumption operates at institutional scale, as well: Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Asphalt Art Initiative, one of the most influential public art grant programs of the past decade, is premised on the claim that “art has the power to transform cities and make their public spaces safer and more vibrant,” with the direction of that transformation assumed rather than examined (Bloomberg Philanthropies, n.d.). This assumption operates across the full spectrum of arts engagement, from academic discourse to professional practice to the broader public.
“Good” operates in several registers across this discourse—morally progressive, socially useful, aesthetically meritorious, community-affirming—and different practitioners emphasize different ones. But across all these registers, the assumption functions in the same way: as an unexamined premise that art’s power flows naturally toward positive ends, however “positive” is defined by the person making the judgment. What matters for this essay is not which version of goodness is assumed, but that the assumption is made at all, and that making it precludes the harder questions: whether the work is doing what its makers intend, whether it is reaching the people it claims to serve in the ways that it claims to serve them, and whether the cost of taking this action—financial, social, political—has been honestly weighed against alternatives.
I understand why this assumption is appealing. It motivates, builds community, and provides moral clarity in a confusing world. And it is not entirely wrong: art is uniquely capable of doing all of those things. The problem is not that the assumption is ungenerous. The problem is that it is untrue. Art’s power to move people emotionally is precisely what makes this assumption so seductive: when a work stirs something deep in us, it is easy to conclude that the stirring is itself evidence of goodness. But emotional resonance is not moral authority. The two can coincide—and often do—but they are not the same thing and conflating them is the root of the problem that this essay is describing. What’s more, operating on an untrue assumption, in a sector this economically and socially significant, is something we cannot afford.
The historical record is unambiguous on this point. Art has long been used not only by democratic movements, but also by empires, oligarchies, and authoritarian movements for illiberal and anti-humanist endeavors. Authoritarian and fascist views can find in art a vehicle that feels as natural and as compelling to their adherents as whatever work you consider a masterpiece. The temptation, when confronted with this, is to resolve the discomfort definitionally: to declare that work made in service of hateful ends simply isn’t art, and thereby maintain the purity of the category of art. But this is circular reasoning, not analysis. It tells us that whatever we call real art is good by definition, foreclosing exactly the examination the moment requires.
Birth of a Nation (1915) was both hateful and a genuine cinematic innovation. It introduced techniques that would define the visual language of film for a century. It was also deliberately designed to move audiences in ways that no film had managed before, inciting many white audiences to, among other things, revive the violent Ku Klux Klan as a mass movement (Stokes, 2007). The film did not succeed despite being art. It succeeded because it was art, because it deployed the full power of a new medium with skill and intentionality.
Hugo Boss dressed the SS—a case study in understanding that the Nazi project was aesthetically deliberate. The regime understood, with remarkable sophistication, that power needs to look like power. The uniforms, the architecture, the mass rallies—these were not decorations on top of a political program. They were the political program’s primary delivery mechanism (Bolt Rasmussen & Wamberg, 2010; Golomstock, 1990; Hugo Boss AG, 2011). They communicated strength, order, and above all a vision of the future. To the people they were designed to reach, they were compelling. They were supposed to be. That mastery was in service of one of the worst political projects in human history, and it worked.
Soviet socialist realism offers a different variation on the same lesson. The state-mandated aesthetic of the USSR was not cold or menacing. It was warm. Heroic workers bathed in golden light, communal joy, the forward march of humanity. It looked like art in the service of human flourishing. Instead, it was art in the service of total control, and it was effective precisely because it knew how to look like the former while achieving the latter (Bolt Rasmussen & Wamberg, 2010; Golomstock, 1990).
Closer to home and to the present, the contemporary American political right has developed a coherent and effective visual and sonic identity. The rallies, the iconography, the look and feel of certain media ecosystems, the meme culture: these constitute a genuine aesthetic project, one that creates community, communicates values, and moves people to action. That this project is laced with hateful imagery—sieg heils, white nationalist symbolism, barely coded appeals to violence—makes it more worthy of analysis, not less. Much of the professional arts world has responded with condescension, classifying this work as too crude or kitsch to warrant serious engagement. This response is a mistake. Dismissing it as not-real-art is not a neutral aesthetic judgment. It is a failure of analysis—one with ongoing political consequences.
The through-line across all these examples is simple but worth stating plainly: the art worked. It moved people. It built identity, loyalty, and meaning. It served causes that ranged from morally catastrophic to deeply contested. But the art itself did not fail. It succeeded at exactly what art is capable of succeeding at, and the values it served were often profoundly different from the values of those who most loudly proclaim art’s inherent goodness.
It also bears mentioning that art is not stable in its meaning and impact; it accretes, gets contested, shifts with context and audience. The Catedral Metropolitana in Mexico City was built with the stones of the Aztec Templo Mayor it replaced: a masterpiece of sacred Baroque architecture and a monument to colonial erasure, simultaneously, in the same building, and today, a tourist landmark and UNESCO heritage site that many visitors experience with no awareness of either. “Yankee Doodle” was a British song mocking ragged colonial soldiers as ridiculous; American revolutionaries sang it back as defiance within a decade. “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s searing anti-lynching protest, is now a jazz standard, sometimes performed in contexts so aestheticized that its origins in grief and outrage are barely audible. None of this makes meaning arbitrary. It makes it contested, which is exactly why meaning demands rigorous engagement rather than a comfortable assumption that art is inherently good and rigidly stable.
This assumption shows up in projects that we encounter on a regular basis in the arts sector. A community rallies to commission a mural about coming together, but who decides what “coming together” means, and whose vision of the neighborhood gets painted on the wall? An arts organization secures a grant to make work about a low-income community’s struggles, exhibits it at galleries across the country, and departs, leaving the community unchanged, sometimes feeling more exposed than helped, while the organization’s reputation and funding grow. An arts nonprofit with an explicitly equity-driven mission pays its artists poverty wages, justifying it with the importance of the work.
The renaming of Columbus Day offers a case study of this dynamic. The holiday was established in direct response to the lynching of Italian immigrants (Vellon, 2014). The Italian Americans who still defend it are not seeking to celebrate colonialism; they are holding onto a recognition of their own historical experience of vulnerability that no one has offered to replace. The movement to rename Columbus Day as Indigenous People’s Day is righteous and has merits, and it simultaneously has handed those Italian Americans nowhere to go except further into a broader white grievance politics that serves no one. Without a recognized site of Italian American historical experiences, that injury becomes legible only within the framework of generalized white identity—one of the only structures available to absorb it. The renaming was culturally resonant but strategically incomplete, and the assumption of goodness is precisely what made it hard to see that in advance. In each of these cases, the people involved believe they are doing good. This doesn’t mean that projects need to advance only if they are “perfect,” but the belief that they were necessarily good was precisely what kept participants from asking the harder questions that would have led to more positive outcomes.
The asphalt art movement offers a second instructive case, this one from within the civic arts sector. Since Bloomberg Philanthropies launched its Asphalt Art Initiative in 2019 and published the landmark Asphalt Art Safety Study in 2022 (which documented a 50% drop in crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists across 22 US projects) cities across North America and Europe have adopted pavement mural programs as a combined safety and placemaking tool (Bloomberg Philanthropies, n.d.; Sam Schwartz Consulting, 2022). The safety evidence is real, and the program has improved lives in many contexts. But the asphalt mural has also become a reflexive civic response, adopted at a pace that has outrun the available evidence base. Questions that would be routine in any other policy context go largely unasked in the published literature: Do these interventions stay effective over time, or do drivers habituate to them? What are the long-term maintenance costs (these works endure significant wear and tear, often requiring costly replacement) and should those funds be drawn from arts budgets or transportation budgets? Does an asphalt mural program represent the best use of either, especially for communities with limited resources? Ground Shift Studio, a DC-based practice with fourteen years of experience creating ground murals, works across multiple media (asphalt, chalk, and vinyl) precisely because different materials serve different goals and different communities (Ground Shift Studio, n.d.). That nuance is largely absent from how cities are currently adopting these programs. The reason is not hard to find. When a program is understood as inherently good, questioning its mechanisms comes to look like opposition to or overcomplication of safety and community investment rather than rigorous stewardship of both.
That misunderstanding of examination as opposition highlights a broader tendency: to treat art as a panacea. A neighborhood is struggling: commission a mural. A community is divided: bring in an artist. Art is powerful, but it is not a singular substitute for organizing, investment, and structural change. Asking art to be the sole vehicle for change sets both artists and communities up for failure. The demand that a single work speak to and for an entire public, incorporating every perspective and offending no one, tends to produce art that says nothing at all. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that an artist with a compelling body of work is not automatically an artist with a social practice. The skills required to make interesting art are not the same as those required to facilitate a strong community process, navigate competing stakeholder interests, and produce a public intervention that actually functions. Conflating these different skills and community needs is unfair to all parties involved—and flows directly from the assumption that art is inherently good.
One of the goals of using art for social impact—whatever form that takes—is presumably to reach people: to shift perspectives, build coalitions, energize allies, and open minds. That requires imaginative empathy with how other people experience the world, including how they experience art. The person moved by a Confederate monument or a MAGA rally is not experiencing a perceptual error. They are responding to something real that the work is doing for them. Understanding that response is neither endorsement nor sympathy. It is the basic prerequisite for meaningful engagement with experiences outside of your own and with ideas that you hope to contest.
If you cannot examine harmful art seriously—if your framework requires you to classify it as aesthetically inferior in order to classify it as morally wrong—you forfeit the ability to understand why it works. And if you don’t understand why it works, you cannot effectively compete with it. An arts practice, an arts advocacy, an arts education that operates from a position of reflexive aesthetic condescension is unilaterally disarmed on the terrain it most needs to contest.
There is a second cost: if art is inherently good, you cannot make a principled case for why some art matters more than others. You will struggle to argue, with any real force, that certain work deserves funding, support, or attention over other work, beyond surface-level markers of moral goodness. You cannot evaluate impact. You cannot learn when ideas stumble. Arts advocacy built on the assumption of inherent goodness is toothless in precisely the policy and funding spaces where it most needs teeth. Because it has no theory of what good art actually does, it cannot distinguish art that does nothing from art that does harm.
This problem takes on particular urgency in a sector that is extremely decentralized. The arts do not have the institutional feedback loops of medicine or law or finance, mechanisms that, however imperfectly, force bad assumptions into contact with contrary evidence over time. The arts are also, far more than other sectors, built around many small operators. A flawed premise can persist in arts discourse for decades, insulated by the sector’s fragmentation, passed from educator to student to practitioner without serious challenge. That is an argument for having this conversation in this journal and in other spaces capable of reaching across institutional and disciplinary lines.
It is worth pausing here to address a misreading that I want to forestall. The argument I am making is not a call for moral dichotomy, for sorting art into acceptable and unacceptable categories, for cultural proscription lists, for a kind of reflexive condemnation that, in its own way, mirrors naïve celebration. The impulse to cancel and the impulse to unconditionally celebrate are, beneath their apparent opposition, the same impulse: the desire for a clean ledger, a world where the moral valence of a work is visible at a glance and requires no further thought.
Art, at its most powerful and most honest, is uniquely capable of resisting this absolute moralizing. It has a special power to transmit multi-layered meaning through a relatively simple vehicle—a song, an image, a two-hour film, a building you walk past every day. No other human practice does quite what art does. Within that deceptively compact form, it can simultaneously carry the weight of a perspective you do not hold, inspire a deeply motivating emotional experience, serve as a source of comfort, a provocation, a mirror, a door. It can make you feel the interior of an alien experience with enough fidelity that you cannot dismiss it from a safe distance—not because it has argued you into that position, but because it has put you inside it. This is what distinguishes art from every other form of communication and persuasion. A policy paper can change your mind. Art can change what it feels like to be you. That is what makes it dangerous. It is also what makes it irreplaceable.
The goal of understanding how harmful art works is not to produce a more sophisticated blacklist. It is to develop the kind of rigorous, multi-perspectival understanding that art itself demands of us and that serious social change has always required. To understand why a particular aesthetic project moves the people it moves is to understand something true and important about human experience, even when—especially when—the values being served are ones you oppose. That understanding does not flatten your values. It equips you to act on them with greater precision, greater empathy, and greater effectiveness.
This, I would argue, is one of art’s most distinctive contributions to public life: art has the unique capacity to foreground the complexity of human experience, refusing the consolations of easy resolution. An arts practice or arts advocacy worthy of that tradition will bring the same refusal to its own assumptions.
The binary of good art and bad art, of art that enlightens and art that degrades, is not a framework. It is a way of avoiding one. What we need instead is a genuine reckoning with art’s power—plural, contested, morally serious, and fundamentally humanist.
None of what I am arguing is moral relativism, and it is worth being precise about this. Acknowledging that harmful art is effective art is not the same as conceding that all art is equally valid or that values are merely subjective. I have values. They are not incidental to this argument; they are its motivation. The point is that values need to be argued for, made legible, demonstrated through the work itself, rather than assumed to be self-evident to anyone with sufficient aesthetic sensitivity. The person who does not share your values is not confused. They have different values. That is a harder problem, and it requires a harder response than condescension.
The good news is that this harder, more rigorous approach is being practiced today. For Freedoms, the artist collective co-founded by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, offers an instructive example (For Freedoms, n.d.). Inspired by Norman Rockwell’s paintings of Roosevelt’s wartime Four Freedoms address, the collective has built a national platform for civic engagement through art that is explicitly non-partisan. The vision was to create a deeply values-driven project that understands that its values cannot be assumed to be universal. Their landmark 50 State Initiative in 2018, the largest creative collaboration in US history, resulted in 744 activations across all 50 states involving over 700 artists and 265 institutions (International Center of Photography, 2020). Crucially, the initiative was designed around the recognition that community opinions are multivalent—that a single artwork cannot speak for an entire public, and that the goal of civic art is to open dialogue rather than foreclose it. When an early billboard in Mississippi generated national controversy, For Freedoms did not retreat into defensive certainty about their own goodness. They studied the response, redesigned their approach, and built an infrastructure for honest exchange.
Monument Lab, the Philadelphia-based public art and history studio co-founded by Paul Farber and Ken Lum, is practicing the same discipline on terrain this essay has already entered (Monument Lab, n.d.). Rather than assuming that the monument landscape we have inherited is settled—good monuments here, bad monuments there—Monument Lab treats it as an open research question. Their 2021 National Monument Audit documented the full scope of what American public spaces commemorate and who is represented, not in order to produce a proscription list, but to make visible what had been naturalized. Their work on a Newark military park statue designed by Gutzon Borglum (a sculptor with documented Ku Klux Klan affiliations, whose granite base was recycled from a Confederate monument) exemplifies their approach: rigorous, historically honest, and oriented toward understanding how monuments accumulate meaning rather than simply toward removing the ones deemed offensive. For Freedoms and Monument Lab are not naive about power; they understand how art and culture shape our realities and imaginations and they engage that power clear-eyed.
These important and challenging conversations are also flourishing in new media. Consider the work of Aidan Walker, a scholar and researcher who studies internet meme culture with the analytical seriousness it demands yet rarely receives (Walker, 2024). Walker does not dismiss the meme ecosystems of the political left and right as beneath examination. He maps them—their grammar, their spread, their emotional logic, their political projects—because understanding how they move people is inseparable from understanding how culture works at all. Or consider Cy Canterel, a systems theorist and media analyst who brings fine arts training to bear on how aesthetics encode and transmit power (Canterel, n.d.). Canterel’s work treats the visual and sonic languages of contemporary political movements as objects of serious inquiry, not symptoms to be pathologized. Both are doing exactly what this paper is calling for: engaging from a humanist perspective with art’s power across the full range of its expression, without flinching and without endorsing.
If you truly believe in the power of art, then a real obligation follows from that belief. You are obligated to take that power seriously across the full range of its expression, obligated to study how it operates when deployed against your values with the same rigor you bring to work that confirms them, and obligated to resist the temptation of aesthetic or moral dismissal.
This obligation falls with particular weight on educators. If we are training artists, advocates, and engaged citizens without equipping them to think critically about how art’s power operates—in whose hands, toward what ends, through what mechanisms—we are preparing them to spin wheels rather than preparing them for the world as it is.
The arts sector is sprawling, decentralized, and chronically under-connected across its own internal boundaries. That is precisely what makes unexamined assumptions so durable within it—and precisely what makes conversations like this one so rare and so necessary. There is no single institution that will force this reckoning. It will need to be actively chosen by participants across the sector.
Powerful art made in service of human dignity has never been naive about this challenge. It has known what it was up against: the aesthetics of power, the instability of meaning, the ease with which good intentions can produce negative outcomes. That knowledge was one source of the work’s strength. We should want nothing less for what we are building now.