American culture absorbed Mao’s thesis that all art serves class politics.

Evidence

Political pundits once dismissed the term culture war as a misleading narrative of American polarization, which distracted the public from coming together to find pragmatic policy solutions. But by the Trump era, both political sides agreed that pop culture was the key battlefield. As a result, purely artistic-minded culture receded in favor of social activism. Even in the US, culture echoed Mao Tse-tung’s assertion that there was “no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 479

Categorization

• SEED: Useful provocation for the counter-case: is the Maoist insistence that all art is political actually the era’s lost signature aesthetic?
• CANDY: The fact that mainstream US culture now echoes Mao’s art-for-art’s-sake dismissal is a striking cocktail-line reversal.